Examining the Snowflake cloud data platform: Architectural aspects and reasons for migration

Introduction

The cloud environs have witnessed a lot of maturity and advancement in the last few years. This has highly influenced organizations that still rely on the traditional analytics infrastructure. There is no dearth of options for the organization to ride along with the emerging cloud wave. A dilemma is created in the minds of the professionals and because of that they often show a reluctance towards cloud migration in general and snowflake migration in particular. 

This article aims to explore the reasons for migration to snowflake while examining the snowflake cloud data platform simultaneously. 

A background study of cloud data warehouse 

The cloud data warehouse market has slipped into an arena of stiff competition. The unique services of the service provider go a long way in determining his hold over the customers. Some of the major proponents in this domain are Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Azure

The evolution of the cloud data platform is what led to the rise of Snowflake. Snowflake didn’t rise from an on-premise data solution or any other database engine. Snowflake came up as a separate entity with a novel architecture of its own. 

Architectural aspects of Snowflake 

The unique feature of the architecture of Snowflake is its hybrid nature. This data warehouse is a blend of shared-disk and shared-nothing architectures. It functions as a rich repository of data that is mined out from different nodes using various computing clusters. 

The architecture of Snowflake comprises a storage layer that is replicated across various physical devices which ensures that data can be accessed from it at any point in time. The next layer is called the virtual layer which is a storehouse of different warehouses whose configuration is determined by the requirements of the user. The unique thing about these virtual warehouses is their processing capability and their resource allocation. These warehouses maintain some kind of cluster independence and secure the sensitive areas of data skillfully. This layer allows both horizontal and vertical scalability. This cloud service layer is famous for it’s high range and scope of users.This layer forms the framework which allows communication between different warehouses. 

due to its high range and scope of user activity it is famous.

This cloud service layer is famous for it’s high range and scope of users.

Migration to Snowflake 

Snowflake is an integrated cloud ecosystem with a dynamic pricing model. It provides scalability which is the best of its kind in the market. It provides complete support for automated analytics and query optimization. The encryption capabilities of the platform ensure that our data is highly secure. 

In addition to the above features, it provides holistic technological support with a wide range of partner connections. Last year, Snowflake also launched a data exchange arena which is a hub for updating different types of datasets regularly. 

Concluding remarks 

Snowflake has positioned itself as the most popular data warehouse over the last few years. This platform can serve as a great remedy for thousands of companies that are reluctant to dedicate resources for the maintenance and support of in-house servers.