We have recently become part of the Snowflake Select Partners, We are very excited about this news because of all the possibilities that partnering with one of the leading Data Warehouse platforms offers us to continue providing the best service to our customers.
Snowflake is a SaaS platform based on the Data Cloud concept that provides a multi-cluster shared data architecture that allows any type of workload to be run on the same data without changing environment.
The platform introduces unique features such as Time-Travel and Zero-Copy-Cloning, which facilitate the work of data engineers in Agile developments, as well as providing multiple access mechanisms to the data and the platform, becoming a single point of access via UI with its Snowsight interface or drivers and connectors such as ODBC/JDBC, Node .js, Go, .NET, Kafka, Spark and Python.
Architecture of Snowflake
Snowflake consists of three layers. All three benefit from the characteristics of cloud environments by providing elasticity, reliability, agility, security and cost reduction, as Snowflake takes care of the ongoing platform maintenance and upgrades required by traditional systems.
Cloud Services Layer
This layer is characterised as the "brain" of Snowflake. It controls user authentication and authorisation, query optimisation, transactions, metadata, data security/governance and infrastructure management. In addition, Snowflake introduces the Data Exchange service that enables simple, transparent, low-maintenance and secure data sharing.
Multi-Cluster Compute layer
This layer is the one that provides the data processing engine, called Virtual Warehouses. It offers flexible options that cover the needs generated by concurrency, such as in Business Intelligence or Reporting scenarios, or the processing of large volumes of data in scenarios such as Data Science and Data Analytics.
Centralised Storage Layer
This is the Data Storage layer. Snowflake stores data on the file system of the chosen cloud provider, which can be Google Cloud (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.
Data is stored in an optimised form for fast access, compressed and encrypted. There are no limitations on the amount of data stored and it is completely independent of the processing layer, so data can be accessed simultaneously from different Virtual Warehouses.
