Re:Snowflake S-1
by afpx on Monday August 24, 2020 @05:05PM
(#24265501)
But, also very expensive. You can do queries on a spark cluster for tiny fractions of what they charge. But, snowflake makes things easy for the "decision makers" (who know SQL). So, all good.
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Having run a medium size Spark cluster, I'm not sure I agree.
If you have 80-100% utilization for a month, perhaps, but the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything.
Saying "you could run it on self-managed Spark/Oracle/Hive/SQLite" is approximately the same argument as saying "I can run a web server cheaper myself than paying Amazon for an EC2 instance" -- there are cases where that is true, but there are many, many, cases where the "on demand capacity" is the bigger benefit.
Re:Snowflake S-1
by filesystem on Monday August 24, 2020 @11:34PM
(#24267927)
I'm not sure how the pricing compares, but there are SaaS spark cluster offerings. Databricks is probably the biggest.
> the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything
Is this why they're making a $350mn annual loss?
A million dollars a day loss would be a pretty big deal to me.