
How Snowflake Rebuilt Its AWS Stack on Azure - the_child
https://www.snowflake.com/blog/how-we-built-snowflake-on-azure/
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nambit
>We couldn’t have built this without close coordination with Microsoft. The
Snowflake on Azure project included many long phone sessions and meetings in
Redmond conference rooms. Several new features were built with Snowflake in
mind, including Azure storage soft delete and improvements to virtual machine
provisioning. A big thank you goes out to the Azure team for helping us
deliver together.

Good to know that you need long phone conversations and meetings and Microsoft
to roll out special features to get yourself onto Azure. I'm sure they didn't
intend it to be this way but not a good look for Microsoft.

~~~
samstave
I don't get this? What would you prefer, that MS azure is not
willing/able/available to those who would want to build something on their
platform?

Why would you expect them not to be engaged?

If the idea is that you would prefer them to not be required in order to
accomplish such a deployment, then maybe azures tech/offering matured such
that the next snowflake like company will not need such close support.

Your comment makes no sense to me.

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frakkingcylons
Sounds like they'd prefer that the Azure platform is sufficiently
functional/comprehensive already so you don't need to ask MS to fix/build
things you need.

~~~
aequitas
My fear is Azure will build solutions specific for a customer which might
never be used by other customers. So that solution is a special case in a
homogeneous cloud platform with all its own problems.

For example, I feel I can trust S3 because of its simplicity and the sheer
amount of systems depending on the same simple functionality of S3 I am using.
If I would get a special feature in S3 just for my use case, there is no
guarantee others will use that feature and it will be as battle hardened as
the generic features.

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bashinator
Audio ads popping open some helpful cartoon character means I hit the back
button and never return.

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vonseel
Three! Disclaimers to hide at bottom of page on mobile! That’s 3 taps on the
X! Jeezus.

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SteveNuts
Does anyone have experience working with Snowflake? I feel like what their
promising is too good to be true and their website is extremely lacking in
substantive details.

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nowarninglabel
We've been using it for a couple years and pretty happy. Every once in a while
there is a bug that takes a while to fix, but really it's been pretty great
compared to what we were using before.

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dominotw
How does it compare to bigquery/redshift (other than multi cloud thing).

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artwr
From my experience, it was pretty speedy even on some (relatively) large
datasets. The decoupling of compute and storage makes it appealing compared to
Redshift if you have bursty load on your cluster.

~~~
nowarninglabel
It was also cheaper for us than Redshift, of course your mileage may vary.

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mr_justin
This is a lot of upfront work, and signing up for continuous maintenance,
computing costs, dealing with vendor-specific oddities, and a host of other
concerns. Whatever is gained from this (being able to sign AWS phobic clients)
must be substantial.

~~~
Johnny555
There are some large companies that don't want to run on Amazon, so they are
probably trying to court that business... but I'm surprised they went with
Azure instead of Google.

I wonder if they are trying to get Walmart?

[https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/wal-mart-to-vendors-
get...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-
amazons-cloud)

 _EDIT_

I don't have to speculate, that's definitely why they went to Azure:

 _Retail clients have pushed Snowflake Computing to make its software
available on Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure cloud._

 _Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia (a Microsoft vet) says that a number of retail
customers “particularly a large one based in Arkansas” have “a fairly strong
opinion” about the Azure availability._

 _The Arkansas reference is likely to Walmart, which prefers not to use
competitor Amazon’s cloud._

[https://seekingalpha.com/news/3369703-cloud-data-
warehouse-c...](https://seekingalpha.com/news/3369703-cloud-data-warehouse-
comes-azure-walmart-pressure)

