Snowflake and Redshift are two of the most popular data warehousing solutions on the market, and both offer on-demand pricing. However, they differ in the way they provide associated features. Snowflake separates compute and storage in its pricing structure, while Redshift combines them. Redshift offers a specific daily amount of concurrent scaling, which is charged per second when usage exceeds it; concurrent scaling is automatically included in all editions of Snowflake.
Snowflake was initially built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to eliminate the hassle of managing infrastructure and allow for virtually infinite scalability of resources. Redshift has recently introduced its own concurrent scaling feature, along with machine learning, to compete with Snowflake's performance capabilities. While Redshift takes a holistic approach to security and compliance, Snowflake takes a more nuanced approach. At the same time, AWS is making significant investments in its own competitor, Redshift.
Since its founding, Snowflake has worked exclusively on public cloud services, allowing customers to quickly access data from anywhere, easily share it, and add or subtract capacity as needed. Snowflake attributes its performance to a unique architecture that supports structured and semi-structured data. As a result, Snowflake is increasing its consumption of storage and computing services from major cloud providers. The key points of distinction in pricing, security and performance determine whether Snowflake or Redshift is a better data warehouse for your company.
According to several people familiar with the situation, Snowflake employees worked well with their AWS counterparts and received good support for the pieces of cloud infrastructure they were using. To increase its gross margin, or the percentage of revenue that remains after subtracting the cost of goods sold, Snowflake's sales have to grow faster than its costs in the cloud. The Snowflake platform and its broad ecosystem of partners provide a basis for improving data governance. In negotiations with customers, Amazon took a rather passive approach, and some sellers were happy to let customers choose Snowflake in the AWS marketplace.
Data is increasingly used as a lifeblood of business applications and application development, and Snowflake's collaboration with AWS has allowed customers to accelerate their digital transformations in this regard.
