18 HOW SNOWFLAKE HELPS CONSUMPTION-BASED APPS THRIVE You’ve learned that leveraging data is key to consumption-based models’ success. This requires a data platform that can scale to meet customer demands; support critical operations such as accurate usage tracking, visibility into the costs of providing services, and data sharing; and provide an excellent foundation for building apps. Snowflake meets those requirements with a near- zero-maintenance platform that delivers near-limitless scale and concurrency so you can confidently offer the scale-on-demand capabilities that anchor usage- based models. Snowflake also integrates data across multiple clouds and regions to give users a seamless experience. And when building apps on Snowflake, you can leverage Snowflake’s own consumption- based pricing model and billing infrastructure. Here’s a closer look at several Snowflake features that support consumption-based applications. SCALABILITY Snowflake’s unique architecture separates storage and compute, enabling SaaS providers to easily provision highly available and scalable dedicated or shared resources on demand. The multi-cluster shared data architecture with separate compute clusters (virtual warehouses) enables seamless scaling of both storage and compute resources. Virtual warehouses can either be standard or multi-cluster warehouses. Standard warehouses consist of a fixed number of compute nodes based on warehouse size. Multi-cluster warehouses can dynamically provision additional clusters as needed. Snowflake automatically suspends resources when they are not utilized. Data is persisted on cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, or GCS), which can be scaled to virtually any capacity. ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT Applications need a robust set of account management features to handle all the tasks involved in onboarding new customers, accurately reporting consumption (whether hourly, daily, monthly or another metric), and monitoring the services offered. The Organization feature in Snowflake enables providers to manage multiple accounts from a single interface, create new accounts themselves, and view usage for multiple accounts in a unified view. Typical account model options include one of the following patterns: • Separate account for each business unit. Dedicated compute and database objects enable easy and exact billing per customer. CHAMPION GUIDES