Ep078: Scaling Through Partnerships: Snowflake's Cloud Engineering Success

AWS for Software Companies Podcast

Through case studies of Graviton implementation and GPU integration, Justin Fitzhugh, Snowflake’s VP of Engineering, demonstrates how cloud-native architecture combined with strategic partnerships can drive technical innovation and build business value.

Topics Include:

  • Cloud engineering and AWS partnership
  • Traditional databases had fixed hardware ratios for compute/storage
  • Snowflake built cloud-native with separated storage and compute
  • Company has never owned physical infrastructure
  • Applications must be cloud-optimized to leverage elastic scaling
  • Snowflake uses credit system for customer billing
  • Credits loosely based on compute resources provided
  • Company maintains cloud-agnostic approach across providers
  • Initially aimed for identical pricing across cloud providers
  • Now allows price variation while maintaining consistent experience
  • Consumption-based revenue model ties to actual usage
  • Performance improvements can actually decrease revenue
  • Company tracked ARM's move to data centers
  • Initially skeptical of Graviton performance claims
  • Porting to ARM required complete pipeline reconstruction
  • Discovered floating point rounding differences between architectures
  • Amazon partnership crucial for library optimization
  • Graviton migration took two years instead of one
  • Achieved 25% performance gain with 20% cost reduction
  • Team requested thousands of GPUs within two months
  • GPU infrastructure was new territory for Snowflake
  • Needed flexible pricing for uncertain future needs
  • Signed three to five-year contracts with flexibility
  • Team pivoted from building to fine-tuning models
  • Partnership allowed adaptation to business changes
  • Emphasizes importance of leveraging provider expertise
  • Recommends early engagement with cloud providers
  • Build relationships before infrastructure needs arise
  • Maintain personal connections with provider executives

Participants:

  • Justin Fitzhugh – VP of Engineering, Snowflake

See how Amazon Web Services gives you the freedom to migrate, innovate, and scale your software company at https://aws.amazon/isv/

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada