Snowflake’s evolution over the last few years is simply amazing. It is currently a data platform with a great ecosystem both in terms of partners and a wide variety of components like snowgrid, snowpark, or streamlit, but in this article, we are not going to focus on its role as a modern cloud-based data warehouse. It revolutionizes the traditional concept of data warehousing; it offers a more agile and scalable platform that separates storage, computing, and services, allowing each component to scale independently. This means you can store unlimited data, ramp up or down your computing resources based on your querying needs, and only pay for what you use.

Currently, we can say that Snowflake is mainly an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) type solution, but as we see further on, it is evolving to provide transactional and analytical capabilities in a single platform. Below is a high-level architecture diagram showing the layers that are part of Snowflake.