[Galanwe]

So the customer data is actually stored on Snowflakes AWS accounts?

What difference does it make what underlying storage / provider it uses then?

Also does that mean every data query to snowflake goes out/in to/from internet at egress/Ingress costs?

[wokwokwok]

> So the customer data is actually stored on Snowflakes AWS accounts?

Yes.

> Also does that mean every data query to snowflake goes out/in to/from internet at egress/Ingress costs?

Yes. It's covered comprehensively in their docs, along with the caveats.

> What difference does it make what underlying storage / provider it uses then?

"Snowflake does not charge data ingress fees. However, a cloud storage provider might charge a data egress fee for transferring data from the provider to your Snowflake account."

unsaid: "...and you have to pay for that".

Note that when they say 'your Snowflake account' they mean our cloud account which we own, and which we run our workloads in, which we refer to as 'your' snowflake account.

Tangibly speaking, what means is that if you want to check up your billing; you go through snowflake; you can't login to a cloud console and see the actual charges the cloud vendor is charging.

> What difference does it make what underlying storage / provider it uses then?

They pass the specific underlying cloud vendor costs on to you (with, I guess, some markup, though you have no way of know what that is :)

[kwillets]

Ironically this model most resembles Teradata, which used to sell their own proprietary hardware/software combination at exorbitant rates.

Snowflake compute instance types cost about $.30-.40 an hour on EC2, so it's quite a markup.

As far as security I do believe they allow the customers to set their own storage keys, so there may be some isolation from a global breach.

[nicornk]

Snowflake usually unloads data to an internal stage bucket in the same region as your snowflake account. If you use an s3 gateway endpoint getting that data is free of egress charges.

[p_l]

At the snowflake size you get custom price lists from cloud operators.

But I think there was also support for peering with client VPCs (or equivalents) which is why they support AWS, Azure, and GCP - you choose the location that is most fitting for linking with your cloud/physical workloads.