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There are a few factors involved but the biggest ones we aren't discussing are demographic shifts and fashion. We've got an entire new generation of developers

There are a few factors involved but the biggest ones we aren't discussing are demographic shifts and fashion. We've got an entire new generation of developers entering into the marketplace that have no idea what life was like _before_ cloud computing was a thing, and their priorities are different than simply avoiding some capex and some graybeard sysadmins. In terms of strategy, AWS is completely and totally unapologetic about copying companies built on top of their platform if it helps them in the future. The author suggest that there haven't been this many companies aimed at the vendors before but that's a lack of insight into the history of how they came about in the first place. When AWS was first launched there were dozens and dozens of vendors competing with, building on top of, and partnering with cloud vendors. Almost none of them exist today. Snowflake is an incredible exception but not a rule. The reason they succeeded (and the reason I personally believe fly will succeed) is because they're building hard to implement underlying technology and focusing on DX. That's basically it. If you're going to compete on economics you're absolutely hooped.

dustintrex 5y ago
"fly"?
- arpa 5y ago
  probably fly.io
mellavora 5y ago
Don't forget that Snowflake (implicitly) supports a paradigm where all of your data ends up locked into AWS. It would just cost too much to move it elsewhere. Note the (current) top post on this article: > hodgesrm 4 hours ago | next [–] > I'm at AWS re:Invent this week and ... Two themes really stand out in the keynotes and associated presentations: > 1.) Becoming a home for data and ML services backed by hardware technologies like Graviton, Trainium, and stupid fast network connectivity. Amazon has dozens of value-added services from S3 to analytic databases. So if Snowflake is helping AWS succeed in AWS goal 1 ("home for data"), I think AWS is smart enough to help Snowflake grow and prosper.
- chrisjc 5y ago
  Your data ends up "locked" (as you mentioned, expensive to migrate/replicate) on the cloud platform that your Snowflake instances are running on; AWS, Google or Azure. I'd say it's in ALL of the cloud providers' interests to help Snowflake grow and prosper on their cloud platform. At the moment it really seems that AWS is most successful here since all of the new and more advanced SF features are coming to AWS-based SF first. Then again, SF started on AWS so probably has most of their roots settled there. While data replication across clouds in SF is expensive, I'm sure SF could/might absorb this one-time cost for you if you needed to migrate, esp if there was any sort of threaten from a particular cloud provider (assuming we're talking about internal stages and tables, not external stages/tables). It's really in SF interest to lower this cost (or liability as you might see it) since they're really pushing for a multi-cloud data ecosystem. Just look at their data exchange product and how they're trying to make the underlying cloud platform irrelevant. The only thing really stopping this from taking off is the cost of setting up replicas in an of the regions or clouds that you want to share to or consume from.
lucid-quiet 5y ago
> The reason they succeeded (and the reason I personally believe fly will succeed) is because they're building hard to implement underlying technology and focusing on DX. I agree. This is how I think about successful software. Not entirely sure there is enough supporting data, or at least it's not easy to collect/access.

dustintrex 5y ago

"fly"?

arpa 5y ago
probably fly.io

mellavora 5y ago

Don't forget that Snowflake (implicitly) supports a paradigm where all of your data ends up locked into AWS. It would just cost too much to move it elsewhere. Note the (current) top post on this article: > hodgesrm 4 hours ago | next [–] > I'm at AWS re:Invent this week and ... Two themes really stand out in the keynotes and associated presentations: > 1.) Becoming a home for data and ML services backed by hardware technologies like Graviton, Trainium, and stupid fast network connectivity. Amazon has dozens of value-added services from S3 to analytic databases. So if Snowflake is helping AWS succeed in AWS goal 1 ("home for data"), I think AWS is smart enough to help Snowflake grow and prosper.

chrisjc 5y ago
Your data ends up "locked" (as you mentioned, expensive to migrate/replicate) on the cloud platform that your Snowflake instances are running on; AWS, Google or Azure. I'd say it's in ALL of the cloud providers' interests to help Snowflake grow and prosper on their cloud platform. At the moment it really seems that AWS is most successful here since all of the new and more advanced SF features are coming to AWS-based SF first. Then again, SF started on AWS so probably has most of their roots settled there. While data replication across clouds in SF is expensive, I'm sure SF could/might absorb this one-time cost for you if you needed to migrate, esp if there was any sort of threaten from a particular cloud provider (assuming we're talking about internal stages and tables, not external stages/tables). It's really in SF interest to lower this cost (or liability as you might see it) since they're really pushing for a multi-cloud data ecosystem. Just look at their data exchange product and how they're trying to make the underlying cloud platform irrelevant. The only thing really stopping this from taking off is the cost of setting up replicas in an of the regions or clouds that you want to share to or consume from.

lucid-quiet 5y ago

> The reason they succeeded (and the reason I personally believe fly will succeed) is because they're building hard to implement underlying technology and focusing on DX. I agree. This is how I think about successful software. Not entirely sure there is enough supporting data, or at least it's not easy to collect/access.