> RevOps management
And now "XxxOps" is a meaningless buzzword.
Why is Snowflake so expensive
151–160 of 217 posts
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#152Great article. On the surface, it's about Snowflake. At a deeper level, the article is about the perverse incentives motivating SaaS businesses to do seemingly dumb, inefficient things and avoid seemingly obvious optimizations by default. Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from tabl…
It's a terrible article. The author misunderstands competition and how much it drives products in this area. Snowflake is incentivized to make their product better on every dimension. If Snowflake don't improve, customers will leave in droves - like when they moved to Snowflake . In practice, as has been pointed out in other comments, they do improve their performance (for competitive reasons) and it does cost them m…
There are many degrees of optimization and clearly there's some cost to bad performance, but Snowflake still has a massive perverse incentive to not spend too much effort on improving performance. If Snowflake is like every software company I've ever been involved with there are many competing projects at any given time and direct revenue impact is a big factor in what gets prioritized.
My own experience with Snowflake absolutely backs up the article's point. At my work we routinely encounter abysmal performance for certain types of queries, due to a flaw on Snowflake's side. We have had numerous talks with them and there is no question that they have an issue, but they have shown absolutely no urgency to fix it. Their recommendation is that we spend more money to work around the problem on their end.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering the same thing. This sums up pretty good I guess: > The best way to describe Snowflake is that it is a brute force method to run complex queries without creating indexes. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554072 )
Column stores on DFS are without a doubt tricky beasts. It’s a very rich field technically. I guess I’m trying to get a read on whether their core competency / moat is distributed columnar query technology or sales/support/marketing.
Snowflake is slower and more expensive than competitors. I'd say its moat is mostly that its extremely easy to set up and start using without technical support. If you've just got a small team and no one wants to do data engineering snowflake makes that possible, or at least much easier. Most users are generally happy, and they've followed the cloud playbook of making it hard to switch off, so even when teams have scaled to the level where secondary indexes and data support staff makes sense the team is still happy with snowflake.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a terrible article. The author misunderstands competition and how much it drives products in this area. Snowflake is incentivized to make their product better on every dimension. If Snowflake don't improve, customers will leave in droves - like when they moved to Snowflake . In practice, as has been pointed out in other comments, they do improve their performance (for competitive reasons) and it does cost them m…
While I think it is definitely in a company's best long term interest to implement features that benefit its customers; it might not be in the best interest of those who are currently running the company. We have seen many, many examples of executives who are willing to sacrifice the future of the company to get a personal short-term gain. Jack up the revenues (or slash costs) in ways that alienate customers is a gre…
Sure but to not even mention churn as something Snowflake is worried about is pretty silly. With the funding environment taking a dramatic turn they (and every other SaaS company) are going to be deeply concerned about price competition and churn
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#155This is a kind of poor engineering writing in which the author finds a product to not be tailored to his precise tastes and concludes it is because the company is user hostile and/or doomed.
The bit about Snowflake not being incentivized to care about costs are trivially untrue. The rest of the article perceives trade offs as simple feature gaps.
For example, Snowflake gives the user more latitude to distribute workloads among “warehouses” than other offerings. With poor distribution the author will experience the workload provisioning issues he describes.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#156[Disclaimer: I work for a company that offers a Snowflake Cost Optimizer product] We’re an open-source monitoring & alerting tool and many of our users were using it to set alerts on their warehousing (Snowflake) costs. The problem with Snowflake is particularly worse due to its lack of query level attribution of costs and no in-built features for monitoring or recommendations on improvements. We’re building a Snowfl…
In my experience Snowflake is very receptive to enhancement requests. If you feel Snowflake should be doing something better for surfacing optimizations, I'd ask them.
That said, I'm not sure your comment is fully accurate: 1) "lack of query level attribution of costs" Snowflake doesn't charge per query so there can't be default query level attribution of cost. Snowflake charges by second of warehouse use. But you CAN easily see which queries ran on which warehouse and allocate costs back to that using your own criteria (by query second, usually better than by number of queries). 2) "no in-built features for monitoring" Snowflake has built in cost monitoring dashboards: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-overview.html And resource monitors: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/resource-monitors.h...
That said, I'm sure improvements could be made. Ask for them. There must be a market for this because Capital One and Acceldata and others offer similar solutions for optimization recommendations.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#157Snowflake is not expensive. Snowflake is super cheap, IF you know what it is for and how to use it. Compared to if you had to solve the problem on your own. The best way to describe Snowflake is that it is a brute force method to run complex queries without creating indexes. If you have a more traditional database, you will notice you need to set up indexes to be able to get anything from it in finite time. What if y…
Honestly, in the financial world, I think the value proposition may be less about anything to do with the query capabilities and more about the permissions model. Making it simple to provide clients with visibility into their data in a structured way that doesn't involve shoveling around text files (with numerous formatting gremlins to worry about) is a huge win in and of itself.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#158it all comes down to the cost of switching and willingness of users to switch. the higher the cost of switching the higher you can make your product's price. Otherwise, with an extremely low cost of switching, the cost will ultimately be driven to near zero as more and more competitors enter the landscape.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#159I disagree with the assertion that Snowflake has no incentive to improve performance. While I don’t work for Snowflake, I work for a competitor and we’re constantly looking to improve performance to make customers happy. For the exact reason that the article claims Snowflake wouldn’t innovate, I’d assert that they would. If they are expensive and slow, and a competitor is faster and cheaper, eventually they will see…
Chrun for these services take a long time. They are "sticky" and have the baggage of enterprise agreements. With the switching costs never being zero, if SLAs are being met, it's exceedingly difficult to switch vendors. Alternatively there is a faster impact on new sign-ups when falling behind competitors on costs and benchmarks.
I worded it poorly, but I don’t necessarily mean a full exodus from the platform. In my experience, large enterprises have a lot of workloads running on different technologies (for whatever reasons) and the migration to cloud is a multi-year effort. If someone is just dipping their toe into Snowflake with easy-to-migrate workloads (which is very likely given their relative age in the market) and see performance and cost issues with those workloads, they may be hesitant to migrate the bigger ones and use that as leverage to get Snowflake to improve.
Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive
#160Great article. On the surface, it's about Snowflake. At a deeper level, the article is about the perverse incentives motivating SaaS businesses to do seemingly dumb, inefficient things and avoid seemingly obvious optimizations by default. Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from tabl…
I worked at a BiqQuery shop and they have a terrific feature where right next to the “Run query” button there is an estimate of the cost of the query, in bytes. It becomes extremely obvious when a query is a full table scan.