Re:Ask HN: What Is Snowflake's Software?
by kwillets on Thursday September 17, 2020 @05:52PM
(#24510397)
It's a data warehouse engine, for running SQL queries, hosted on cloud EC2 instances and s3 storage (and Azure, etc. equivalents).
It's like Vertica or Redshift, or older examples like Teradata. It runs on a cluster of machines which process queries and data loading, etc. in parallel, for a read-heavy workload.
It offers some ability to scale up and down, and to throttle CPU independently from storage.
But it's not cheaper or faster than other products, which makes the scaling somewhat moot.
It's like Vertica or Redshift, or older examples like Teradata. It runs on a cluster of machines which process queries and data loading, etc. in parallel, for a read-heavy workload.
It offers some ability to scale up and down, and to throttle CPU independently from storage.
But it's not cheaper or faster than other products, which makes the scaling somewhat moot.