Ep078: Scaling Through Partnerships: Snowflake's Cloud Engineering Success

Through case studies of Graviton implementation and GPU integration, Justin Fitzhugh, Snowflake’s VP of Engineering, demonstrates how cloud-native architecture combined with strategic partnerships can drive technical innovation and build business value.

Topics Include:

• Cloud engineering and AWS partnership
• Traditional databases had fixed hardware ratios for compute/storage
• Snowflake built cloud-native with separated storage and compute
• Company has never owned physical infrastructure
• Applications must be cloud-optimized to leverage elastic scaling
• Snowflake uses credit system for customer billing
• Credits loosely based on compute resources provided
• Company maintains cloud-agnostic approach across providers
• Initially aimed for identical pricing across cloud providers
• Now allows price variation while maintaining consistent experience
• Consumption-based revenue model ties to actual usage
• Performance improvements can actually decrease revenue
• Company tracked ARM's move to data centers
• Initially skeptical of Graviton performance claims
• Porting to ARM required complete pipeline reconstruction
• Discovered floating point rounding differences between architectures
• Amazon partnership crucial for library optimization
• Graviton migration took two years instead of one
• Achieved 25% performance gain with 20% cost reduction
• Team requested thousands of GPUs within two months
• GPU infrastructure was new territory for Snowflake
• Needed flexible pricing for uncertain future needs
• Signed three to five-year contracts with flexibility
• Team pivoted from building to fine-tuning models
• Partnership allowed adaptation to business changes
• Emphasizes importance of leveraging provider expertise
• Recommends early engagement with cloud providers
• Build relationships before infrastructure needs arise
• Maintain personal connections with provider executives

Participants:

• Justin Fitzhugh – VP of Engineering, Snowflake

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