Snowflake’s solution

To address the scalability issue that has plagued databases since inception, the Snowflake team decided to formulate a new approach that would not be tied down by the limitations of past designs. They developed a modern platform built natively for the cloud that uses its unique features to enable concurrency, scalability, and real-time collaboration.

Snowflake’s innovative cloud architecture still relies on physical disks, but it integrates them logically to make centralized storage available to its computing clusters without concurrency bottlenecks or data replication overhead. Finally, the best of what shared-disk and shared-nothing promised: separating the data from compute workloads, which can be independently provisioned and resized.

Snowflake runs entirely on virtually provisioned resources from cloud platforms (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud). Snowflake handles all interactions with the cloud provider transparently, abstracting the...