Supercloud is changing the cloud landscape. The concept is to create a unified environment where users can access applications, services and data from multiple cloud providers, without requiring specific expertise in the underlying infrastructure. Snowflake has developed its own approach to the Supercloud by building a “Data Cloud” that offers businesses and organisations numerous benefits.
Many organisations and businesses face the challenge of choosing between private clouds, on-premise hosting or public cloud providers. More often than not, most end up using a combination of these options, resulting in applications only being able to run within specific environments and data becoming inaccessible between the different platforms.
By combining the resources from multiple public cloud platforms into a single unified platform, Supercloud makes it possible to access applications and data from any cloud provider whatsoever. This provides access to a truly global infrastructure and removes the underlying complexity, while eliminating the need for expensive migration projects and data transfers.
“It’s a big advantage that you allow companies and organisations to do what they are good at, instead of having to fine-tune, spin up servers and think about how to set up different pipelines. Things should just work. We don’t think you should be limited to a single cloud provider, nor should you have to choose between on-premise and cloud,” says Konstantin Ekström, Business Intelligence Consultant at Random Forest.
Snowflake has taken its own approach to the Supercloud concept. Instead of leveraging the resources from multiple public cloud platforms, Snowflake has created its own “Data Cloud” that spans multiple clouds and regions of the world. By creating its own data cloud, the company has been able to provide its customers with a highly flexible and scalable infrastructure in the three major clouds AWS (Amazon), GCP (Google) and Azure (Microsoft) and also made it possible to utilise data on-premise.
The Snowflake Data Cloud is enabled by a technology layer called “Snowgrid.” Alexander Jaballah, Partner Sales Engineer at Snowflake, explains,
“The Snowgrid layer allows customers and organisations to seamlessly use Snowflake across different cloud providers. This has several advantages: you can share data services and applications between different clouds and regions without having to set up complicated ETL processes. It is easier when it comes to the governance aspects because management is simplified and everything is visible across the entire ecosystem. In addition, business continuity is improved by being able to replicate data and other items across both clouds and regions, thus increasing resilience and minimising business disruption in the event of a disaster.”
More information on Supercloud and Snowflake can be found in episode 47 of the Data Podcast. (In Swedish)
