AWS Morning Brief SnowflakeDB’s S-1: The Fine Print (Whiteboard Confessional)
About Corey Quinn
Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.
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Corey: Welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional series, where I am joined once again by my colleague, Pete Cheslock. Pete, thanks for taking the time to tolerate my slings, arrows, and other various forms of cynicism.
Pete: You know, I didn't take that much offense to the fact that I have an MBA, so I decided to come back and see if we can make use of that investment.
Corey: So, fun story. The last one of these that we did was talking about—who's one was that? They're starting to run together at this point.
Pete: That was Sumo Logic’s.
Corey: That's right. And it was, “Oh, let’s talk about what they're doing.” And then throughout the day, I think five tech companies all filed to go public, which is just bizarre. So, we're going to take a couple more episodes to slice and dice a couple more that were of interest to us.
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to chat about one that I was honestly been waiting for because of the hype and the myths around this company. But it's a big data company called Snowflake.
Corey: They're very special and unique.
Pete: They're very special. I think—I often will listen to CNBC in the background, it's kind of interesting to get little words, and sometimes tech pops up into a CNBC broadcast. When Snowflake filed. I think one of the announcers had said something to the effect of, “I don't know why you'd want to be called Snowflake.” [laughs]. So, I had a good chuckle at that one.
Corey: Because they've been around longer then that's been a disparaging term used by jerks.
Pete: [laughs]. Exactly, exactly. So, they filed their S-1 in that flurry with a whole slew of other companies—which we will definitely get to at least one more of those—and honestly, this company, I've never worked there. I did at one point go through a sales process which I can share some of my thoughts and opinions there, but the reason why I was so excited to see this one is because of the sheer amount of VC money that this company has raised, well over—I don't know if ‘well over’ but definitely over a billion dollars of VC funding raised. It's crazy.
Corey: My comment at one of the big tech conferences last year—back when that was a thing we went to—was I was walking around their booth, and I noticed that they had this mock-up of a race car suspended in the air. And then I realized, “Oh, my God, that isn't a mock-up.” Which told me at that point that if you're paying retail pricing for Snowflake, you're probably doing something very wrong.
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. I think to dive into one of my favorite Snowflake stories, at a previous company, we were checking Snowflake out—we got connected with them via some connections our head of product had and some success that we heard that Snowflake had with helping, you know, a data warehouse. That's what it is: it's a data warehouse technology. If you're in the Amazon ecosystem, you might be using Redshift. Snowflake can do some of those things, it can do some other things.
Corey: Why would I use something like Snowflake instead of Redshift? I mean, for starters, naive approach as well, okay, this is in a different Amazon account, so at minimum, I'm going to be paying data transfer in and out on both sides. But again, we're talking data warehousing, the data transfer is usually something of a rounding error compared to all the extra cost goes into that.
Pete: And this is where I think a lot of their growth in the early days came from a lot of the deficiencies in Redshift. In technologies, in the investment that Amazon was doing there, Snowflake could do a lot of things just simply better. I think additionally, too, they were probably taking a lot of business from Oracle shops and things of that nature. But I do know a friend of mine at his company, they had a well over a million dollars a month in Redshift spend, and they actually moved over to Snowflake as a cost-savings initiative. It was significantly cheaper.
But what’s, I think, so fascinating, when I heard that I was like, “Well, hold on a second. You know, Snowflake runs inside of Amazon.” So, I'm always curious of how that relationship exists with Amazon where you've got some account manager who's going to lose on some big spend of an Amazon customer by their Redshift spend going down dramatically, but then whoever the account manager for Snowflake must just be super excited by that because obviously their spend is going to go up.
Corey: Yeah, on some level, if you're running a data warehouse on top of AWS, from the high-level AWS perspective, well, is it spend that’s going to happen on your account, or is it spend that’s going to happen on Snowflakes account? It's not likely that you're going to be building everything on top of AWS, and then Snowflake is going to be running its stuff on another provider. The data transfer charges there become exceedingly non-trivial.
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that is interesting about how Snowflake works, at least from my recollection a few years ago, is that you can stream your data into S3 which is very cost-effective. Snowflake can actually ingest your data from S3, and what they basically do is they put it into their S3. And you pay the same S3 pricing. I remember the sales guy.
He w...