An Architecture Built for the Cloud
One copy of your data, virtually unlimited cloud resources
Report
O'Reilly Report: Architecting Data-Intensive SaaS Applications with Snowflake
Built from the ground up for the cloud, Snowflake’s unique multi-cluster shared data architecture delivers the performance, scale, elasticity, and concurrency today’s organizations require.
Snowflake is a single, integrated platform delivered as-a-service. It features storage, compute, and global services layers that are physically separated but logically integrated. Data workloads scale independently from one another, making it an ideal platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, modern data sharing, and developing data applications.
Do more with data
Say goodbye to resource limitations and wait times with the ability to instantly spin up and down a virtually unlimited number of concurrent workloads against the same, single copy of your data.
Resilient and predictable by design
Capitalize on Snowflake’s built-in replication and failover/failback features that ensure your data and applications live up to your business continuity requirements.
Focus on data, not infrastructure
Eliminate the administration and management demands of traditional data platforms thanks to Snowflake’s fully managed Data Cloud.
Cloud Services
If Snowflake’s computing layer is the brawn of our solution, our cloud services layer is the brain. Snowflake’s cloud services manage client sessions, metadata, transactions, query planning, security/governance and many other services. It’s also a highly scalable tier thanks to the near-limitless computing resources in the cloud. Snowflake supports thousands of customer accounts and hundreds of millions of queries each and every day.
Multi-Cluster Compute
Fully decoupled from the storage layer, our computing layer runs virtually any number of workloads on their own dedicated compute clusters, even if these workloads access the same underlying data. Dedicating compute resources for each workload avoids the drawbacks of running all workloads on a single, large cluster, such as having to queue or drop workloads, or engage in the costly and time-consuming effort of increasing compute capacity. With Snowflake, compute resources are independently sized based on the need of each workload. And Snowflake provides a usage-based, pay-by-the-second business model, with zero cost when a workload is automatically suspended.
Centralized Storage
Our storage layer is designed to support sub-second query response times against multi-petabyte table sizes, without explicitly partitioning the data. Snowflake also provides native support for semi-structured data types such as JSON. In addition, Snowflake fully supports ACID transactions with fast insert/update/delete/merge operations. Your data is also highly secure. Among our many built-in data security features, Snowflake encrypts all data at rest and in transit.
Get Started
Getting started with Snowflake is easy. Sign up today, get a demo, or join one of our hands-on labs.