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Ask HN: What Is Snowflake's Software?

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Ask HN: What Is Snowflake's Software?

Post by dcdevthrowaway » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

Snowflake was just in the news for their big IPO - raising $3.4B and garnering a $70B valuation: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/09/16/Snowflake-sets-new-software-IPO-record/7451600286729/

But after reading a few articles and browsing snowflake.com a bit, I still don't really get what Snowflake is. Some articles mention AI, some cloud, there's talk of data lakes and data warehouses, a data marketplace, etc.

But what actually is it? Is is Hadoop/HDFS with nice tools and consulting expertise on top? Is it a data center in a box?

What the heck is this thing?

Re: Ask HN: What Is Snowflake's Software?

Post by kwillets » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

It's a data warehouse engine, for running SQL queries, hosted on cloud EC2 instances and s3 storage (and Azure, etc. equivalents).

It's like Vertica or Redshift, or older examples like Teradata. It runs on a cluster of machines which process queries and data loading, etc. in parallel, for a read-heavy workload.

It offers some ability to scale up and down, and to throttle CPU independently from storage.

But it's not cheaper or faster than other products, which makes the scaling somewhat moot.

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