Having run a medium size Spark cluster, I'm not sure I agree.
If you have 80-100% utilization for a month, perhaps, but the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything.
Saying "you could run it on self-managed Spark/Oracle/Hive/SQLite" is approximately the same argument as saying "I can run a web server cheaper myself than paying Amazon for an EC2 instance" -- there are cases where that is true, but there are many, many, cases where the "on demand capacity" is the bigger benefit.
> the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything
Is this why they're making a $350mn annual loss?
A million dollars a day loss would be a pretty big deal to me.
If you have 80-100% utilization for a month, perhaps, but the beauty of Snowflake is that you can spin up a 3XL warehouse for a few MINUTES to get answers fast, and then shut it down again and don't pay anything.
Saying "you could run it on self-managed Spark/Oracle/Hive/SQLite" is approximately the same argument as saying "I can run a web server cheaper myself than paying Amazon for an EC2 instance" -- there are cases where that is true, but there are many, many, cases where the "on demand capacity" is the bigger benefit.