3 ms·

The cost saving comes from the fact that Snowflake virtual warehouses by default time out after 10 minutes and this can be lowered, realistically to 60 seconds.

The cost saving comes from the fact that Snowflake virtual warehouses by default time out after 10 minutes and this can be lowered, realistically to 60 seconds. They must have been using very overprovisioned servers to run up $1 million per year in Snowflake spend for occasional 10 minute bursts of activity prior to the change. I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction.

pjc50 3y ago
> I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. Those are the same thing. (one of the massive, massive advantages and disadvantages of cloud in general is that it circumvents "purchasing" departments. One the one hand: you don't have to spend $10,000 of time trying to buy $1000 of computer. On the other: you can waste millions on the cloud and maybe nobody will even notice.)
- arethuza 3y ago
  It can also circumvent in-house infrastructure teams - who I used to find were a far bigger challenge than purchasing. I used to work somewhere where the main mission of the infrastructure team seemed to be to prevent anyone actually running anything on all of the lovely hardware they managed - which reached peak madness when I was quoted £75,000 for hosting a single static HTML page for internal only access.
dustingetz 3y ago
number is also reported out of context and not as a % - i detect moral hazard by author here
hodgesrm 3y ago
> I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. This is a "blame the user" argument that I hear a lot. It's true that in many or most cases users being super attentive can mitigate cost issues. But it's also true that this turns out to be very difficult in practice for a variety of reasons like scattered responsibility, complexity of cloud costs, and vendor cost models that encourage spending. For my own money this problem looks like a business opportunity for vendors that offer customers ways to avoid it. The high margin era of cloud services with 10x markup on compute (e.g., Snowflake) won't last forever.

pjc50 3y ago

> I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. Those are the same thing. (one of the massive, massive advantages and disadvantages of cloud in general is that it circumvents "purchasing" departments. One the one hand: you don't have to spend $10,000 of time trying to buy $1000 of computer. On the other: you can waste millions on the cloud and maybe nobody will even notice.)

arethuza 3y ago
It can also circumvent in-house infrastructure teams - who I used to find were a far bigger challenge than purchasing. I used to work somewhere where the main mission of the infrastructure team seemed to be to prevent anyone actually running anything on all of the lovely hardware they managed - which reached peak madness when I was quoted £75,000 for hosting a single static HTML page for internal only access.

dustingetz 3y ago

number is also reported out of context and not as a % - i detect moral hazard by author here

hodgesrm 3y ago

> I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. This is a "blame the user" argument that I hear a lot. It's true that in many or most cases users being super attentive can mitigate cost issues. But it's also true that this turns out to be very difficult in practice for a variety of reasons like scattered responsibility, complexity of cloud costs, and vendor cost models that encourage spending. For my own money this problem looks like a business opportunity for vendors that offer customers ways to avoid it. The high margin era of cloud services with 10x markup on compute (e.g., Snowflake) won't last forever.