Summary

Snowflake’s hybrid cloud-native design, built for the cloud from the ground up, enables real-time data sharing and on-demand workload sizing that gives its users unparalleled flexibility—overcoming many scalability limitations of previous database architectures. Snowflake’s architecture allows secure data sharing between organizations across regions and cloud providers as quickly as it does between databases in the same account.

By understanding each of the layers that make up Snowflake’s cloud architecture (storage, compute, and services), we gained insight into how they enable powerful features such as zero-copy cloning, Time Travel, Hybrid Unistore, and hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) tables and open the gates to interacting with semi-structured and unstructured data.

This chapter also outlined the costs of each of the three architecture layers and how to keep them in check. Furthermore, we discussed how various caching...