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Why is Snowflake so expensive

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Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#211

Post by hodgesrm »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #209
hodgesrm wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a terrible article. The author misunderstands competition and how much it drives products in this area. Agree, but the author has one thing right. Snowflake is not transparent about product behavior, which makes it hard to reason about costs and performance. Open source data warehouses like ClickHouse and Druid don't have this problem. If you want to know how something works, you can look at the code. Or liste…

Sure but if you want full transparency you don't use Snowflake. They never sold themselves as that. I wouldn't buy a Ferrari and complain about lack of trunk space.

I'm not complaining, of course. It's just an observation. Snowflake is very similar to Oracle in that respect, which is not surprising given where the founders came from.

Personally I think Snowflake is very impressive on the things they optimize for, which includes complex queries on enterprise data sources. The same could be said for BigQuery.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#212

Post by hodgesrm »

deepGem wrote: post #31
cs702 wrote: post #7

Great 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…

Wow their statement about not participating in benchmarking wars is alarming. In this day and age, when benchmarking tools are so inexpensive and almost everything is very transparent, why not participate. Or even better engage with a neutral third party such as Jepsen to get on an even playing field and duke it out.

> Wow their statement about not participating in benchmarking wars is alarming.

I found the Snowflake statement pretty reasonable. [0]

Vendor benchmarks are largely propaganda. What actually counts is performance on real-world workloads, starting with your own. Plus good bencharks are costly to do well. If vendors are going to invest in load testing, it's way better to do it as part of the QA process, which directly benefits users. The other thing for vendors to do is to drop DeWitt clauses so others can run benchmarks and share the results. Snowflake announced this in the statement and also changed their acceptable use policy accordingly. [1]

[0] https://www.snowflake.com/blog/industry-benchmarks-and-compe...

[1] https://www.snowflake.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy/

Disclaimer: My company runs a cloud service for ClickHouse that competes against Snowflake.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#213

Post by stassajin »

evtx wrote: post #210
stassajin wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In my experience, companies are typically evaluating spend on other platforms and after some testing, moving additional workloads there to displace cost elsewhere" Fair point, some of that net revenue increase is because of consolidation of workloads, although the majority of the cost is likely still driven by consumers expanding usage beyond what they expected. As I mention in my article, the second part of increas…

I read your link. My immediate reaction: 1) I think Andreessen Horowitz has probably oversimplified the issue based on the Dropbox outlier. It's easy to say you can build your own datacenter to manage stuff but the costs in people are really hard to offset, especially with the security posture and level of 999s that most companies need. Not only that, but throw in disaster recovery, so now you've doubled the costs (t…

Thanks for sharing your perspective. It's always useful to get a more experienced viewpoint. I agree that managing hardware is not something that should be taken lightly and that only companies at scale can do that and should do that: uber, facebook, dropbox. I'm not pushing for managing your own data-centers, but I'm overall more hopeful that open source gets better and more data engineers learn the craft, it would be cheaper to run things yourself once your Snowflake bill is in the millions per month.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#215

Post by rnk »

What most commentators are missing here is that Snowflake had a significant revenue reduction when they improved the efficiency of their product, ie they could do more with less customer cost, less cpu use. This is similar to AWS lowering prices for many things steadily over time. Snowflake did this knowing that they would get less revenue, they would have less growth, and I suspect they also knew it would cause their stock price to go down. Here's an article on it from March, https://www.yahoo.com/now/snowflake-plunges-revenue-growth-o....

Certainly snowflake wants to make it easier for people to spend money and solve all their problems on that platform, every company wants that. But it's a very competitive world out there, and snowflake leaders aren't complete idiots - they have to keep lowering their prices when they can, otherwise new people will come along and do things cheaper.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#216

Post by danielmarkbruce »

simo7 wrote: post #173
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #124

Earlier 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…

The main flaw of the article is not controlling for product category. I suspect most data warehouses have similar NDRs. In many companies a data warehouse is the place where you dump all your data and let everyone run poorly written programs against it. Add to that poor engineering culture in data teams (often lead by non-technical people) and costs are bound to skyrocket.

> In many companies a data warehouse is the place where you dump all your data and let everyone run poorly written programs against it.

Hilariously accurate description of a data warehouse.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#217

Post by tommyphongs »

The article I doesn't have exprience with Snowflake but with Cloudera's tech stack on on-primise infrastructure. Both Cloudera and Snowflake use same approach: Separating computing and storage with main purpose: trade-of performance for scalability, easily maintaining without knowledge about user data, thus easily selling the solution to a wide range of customers without care about customer cost( maybe this also of them purpose). In my experience with Cloudera's tech stack, it become very complexity bruce-forced system, we need install HDFS for store data( storage layer), and Hive ( basically use Mysql to keep mapping between table and the hdfs file of that table)metadata store to keep HDFS's metadata, Impala to query engine( computing layer). Because computing layer don't know much about how data are organized, It is very limited when we want optimise our system, query like 'select * from TABLE limit 1' lead to scan overall data on many of hdfs file, and because Impala is memory computing engine, scan all table data lead to memory exceed, and because that, DA can't use sampling data to quickly manipulate with our data. Everything leads to the hell, and because many of things can effect to our system: HDFS, Impala, Hive metadata store, etc... so very hard to fix problem when it occurred.
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