Snowflake, the cloud data platform
Snowflake has become in a few years the Data Warehousing as a Service tool, DWaaS, a reference in the market, standing out as an alternative to traditional systems such as Oracle or Hadoop.
One of the great advantages of Snowflake is its speed when processing queries: the data is stored in a distributed manner in different clusters, which allows queries to be processed in parallel, notably shortening response times. As stated by Ken Wook, Data Team Manager at CapSpecialty: "with Snowflake we can run reports that previously took 2 - 3 days in just 45 minutes"
This speed is possible thanks to its architecture, made up of 3 physically separated layers:
- An upper layer with a set of cloud services, which allow the management of data access security, metadata management, different interfaces for uploading and downloading data, optimization tools, etc.
- An intermediate layer in charge of calculations, totally separated from the data and organized in clusters between which the computing tasks are divided.
- An independent and centralized storage, which can work on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
Another of the great advantages of Snowflake is the management of security and data access permissions, which facilitates the exchange of information. The information is not moved or duplicated, but access permissions are established, in such a way that the information is always updated and available to users or organizations with the necessary permissions. In addition, the information is automatically encrypted by Snowflake, which adds an extra level of security in a transparent way for the user.
Snowflake is a product developed from the beginning with a 100% cloud philosophy, so the scalability of resources is extremely easy for the administrator, being managed from the tool's control panel. This scaling can be of two types:
- Vertical to improve performance in heavy query and data loading scenarios.
- Horizontal to improve performance in situations of high concurrency of queries.
Finally, following this Cloud philosophy, all costs are variable, depending on the execution time of the queries and the volume of data stored, without costs associated with physical structures, which allows you to pay for the actual use of the tool.
Our company have signed a partnership agreement, as we did with Qlik, with Snowflake, which will allow us to improve our portfolio of services and capabilities in the field of data management and governance. In the words of David Puig, Head of Data, “Snowflake is becoming one of the fastest growing and most potential tools in the field of cloud data governance, storage, processing and sharing. This collaboration makes possible for Izertis to continue at the forefront of new technologies and thus provide all our clients with new technological solutions, thanks to the technological surveillance service that we execute and continue to be a benchmark in the data universe”.