Written by Øyvind Botn

Snowflake is an awesome piece of software that has achieved a lot over the years. However, a lot of the things that’s been accomplished with the product hasn’t really reached the customers, and it’s not necessarily Snowflake's fault.

Snowflake started to take the Scandinavian market by storm between 2017 and 2020. Back then, Snowflake offered something that no one else did. It delivered a functional and scalable database with automated maintenance, aimed at the analytic segment. And with a fantastic sales and marketing team onboard, they managed to place Snowflake at the top of most business leaders' wish-list.

From an engineering point of view, Snowflake didn’t offer much in terms of new features, as horizontal scaling, column store, and automated maintenance had been on the market for a long time, but Snowflake targeted the real pain-points in the market by being plain simple. To create the same features as Snowflake with the previously available software, you had to know every single moving part in the system and its internals, and even then, the result was complex and with a high risk of doing it wrongly. With Snowflake it was as easy as writing create database, create table, or any of the other common commands, and you didn’t have to think about anything else because Snowflake fixed it for you.

And this has been Snowflake's greatest selling point - simplicity. With Snowflake you don’t have to think about indexing, storage optimization, caching, RAM allocation, query hits, processing, or any of the other stuff you needed to know in your previous projects. Snowflake had automated everything, leaving nothing else to the developers than to ask for more money to increase the compute power.

And this is also Snowflake's biggest flaw. With Snowflake's mission: “we take care of the tech so you can concentrate on the business deliveries”, it can be interpreted as: “we leave no room for developers to improve the system, you just have to pay us more”.

Because Snowflake has become crazy expensive. It's not just that the USD/NOK exchange rate has skyrocketed over the past few years, but Snowflake’s enterprise license in Azure West Europe is 3.9 USD per credit, or 5.2 USD per credit for Business critical, if you would like to limit data transportation to private network. And when architects start to look at the system features and decide that they in addition would need supporting software to handle integration, transformation, API exposure, caching, security handling, as well as visualization, then Snowflake is left as a passive contributor in the architectural solution - much like an S3 bucket from AWS. My point is not to push Snowflake down into the mud, but I want to make people aware of what they're actually paying for.

Snowflake has extended its product platform with e.g. the "Snowpipe", which enables data ingestion from file storage (S3, SA, GCS) and Kafka, as well as "Snowpark", that enables Python, Java or Scala programming in notebooks or through regular IDE’s, making all sources available. It also has a built-in orchestration framework (or …well…to some degree). However, these solutions don't seem to be mature enough yet, which is why I closely follow Snowflake’s release notes, searching for that one release that will enable me to cut any Snowflake implementation cost to 1/3, by making a (temporary) support software redundant from the solution architecture.

So, what is the point that I want to highlight here? I want you to be aware that Snowflake is not the same product as it was back in 2019, even though most of its clients still use it as it initially was. In all its simplicity, the common implementation of Snowflake can be compared to an S3 bucket with compute on top, although a very expensive one.  

So, if you are paying for a suite, then you should make sure you make full use of that suite. However, if you only need to store your data in a bucket and read it with SQL, then I believe there are better and cheaper alternatives available out there.  

For those of you that want to experience the real power of Snowflake - reach out to us!