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Snowflake has skyrocketed in popularity over the past 5 years and firmly planted itself at the center of many companies' data stacks. Snowflake came into existence in 2012 with a unique architecture, described in their seminal white paper as "the elastic data warehouse". Rather than have compute and storage coupled on the same machine like their competitors did, they proposed a new design that took advantage of the near-infinite resources available in cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this post, we'll dive into the three layers of Snowflake's data warehouse architecture: cloud services, compute and storage.
In case it's not obvious to folks, there is a disclosure absent (I don't think intentionally so, but still remains):

Submitter is also the author and founder of select.dev, a service selling Snowflake optimization.

Correct! thanks for calling out. Should I disclose this in the text next time? What's the common practice?
I submit my own materials regularly without disclosing. It's awkward to post after to submitting. Articles are either interesting or they are not. Readers on HN are pretty discerning and can make up their own minds.

Your article is a nice intro for people who don't understand how Snowflake works. Thank you for the submission. I'll be interested to see what you are doing.

Gotcha. Thanks for the feedback! Happy to chat at any point, just shoot me a message. I'm fairly easy to find on Twitter/LinkedIn/my website.
> innovative storage features like zero-copy cloning and time travel.

These are not original to SF. COW snapshot cloning has been around for decades, and eg Vertica has had a copy_table function since IDK how long.

Time travel was in V1 of Vertica, and a quick search shows the same feature in DB2 and other platforms.