Re:Snowflake Computing raises $263M for its data warehouse
by georgewfraser on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:50PM
(#16259660)
Snowflake is most definitely running multiple instances for anything but the smallest clusters. It's plausible that one warehouse might scale better as you increase the number of nodes but I would really be surprised if there was a big difference---the techniques for query execution are pretty well-known, so Redshift and Snowflake are probably doing the same things. I did a benchmark I while ago [1] and I'm definitely planning on adding multiple scales to evaluate how they compare as you increase data size.
[1] https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-dce9f4c529c1
Snowflake would just run an EC2 instance in the background for compute, and the very largest EC2 instances were more expensive to run than a Redshift cluster of similar power.