Supercloud: The race is on, and Snowflake is the front-runner
This article has been written by:
Konstantin Ekström — Business Intelligence Consultant, Random Forest
Alexander Jaballah — Partner Sales Engineer, Snowflake
Feel free to contact us for any questions or discussions
This is Supercloud
The Supercloud is an advanced cloud computing platform that goes beyond the limitations of traditional public cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It offers a unified environment for managing workloads and data, simplifying application development, operations, and secure data sharing.
The Supercloud offers three essential properties that set it apart from traditional cloud platforms:
1. Ability to access services running on multiple clouds without requiring specific expertise in the underlying infrastructure.
2. A purpose-built SuperPaaS layer that abstracts the native PaaS layer, providing a consistent user experience across clouds.
3. Metadata Intelligence optimized for specific Supercloud services, running workloads efficiently across federated cloud platforms.
The Supercloud can be deployed as a single cloud instantiation, multi-cloud or multi-region instantiation, or global instantiation, offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) options.
The future of cloud computing
Many organizations are faced with the challenge of choosing between private cloud, on-premise hosting, and public cloud providers. However, most companies end up using a combination of these options, resulting in the problem of applications that can only run within specific environments, and inaccessible data across platforms.
This issue has similarities to the logistics industry’s pre-containerization era, where goods had to be manually loaded and transportation methods had to be carefully chosen based on individual vendor restrictions and resource availability. If the method of transportation had to change during transport, goods would need to be repacked to meet the new requirements.
In the context of the Supercloud, the cloud vendors represent logistics providers owning various transportation modes, while the person shipping goods represents the user. Supercloud can be compared to the introduction of containers, which allowed senders to ship goods in standardized boxes regardless of the chosen vendor. Similarly, Supercloud allows applications to be run or data to be accessed using any cloud vendor’s platform, stripping away underlying complexity and eliminating the need for expensive migration projects or data transfers.
Just as containerization revolutionized the logistics industry by simplifying shipping, Supercloud is poised to transform the cloud computing landscape.
Tangible benefits for businesses
By combining the resources of multiple public cloud platforms into a single unified platform, Supercloud enables companies to take advantage of new business opportunities as they arise, thanks to its ability to support a wider range of use cases. With a seamless experience across all cloud providers, Supercloud makes it easy to adapt to changing market conditions, stay ahead of the competition, and grow.
In addition, supercloud helps companies save money by providing a single platform that leverages the resources of multiple public cloud platforms, giving access to a truly global infrastructure. This reduces costs associated with managing multiple cloud platforms, as well as costs associated with data transfers and storage.
How Snowflake copes with Supercloud
Snowflake is the guiding star and has taken a unique approach to the concept of Supercloud. Instead of leveraging the resources of multiple public cloud platforms, Snowflake has created its own “Data Cloud” that spans across multiple clouds and regions in the world. By creating its own Data Cloud, Snowflake has been able to provide its customers with a highly flexible and scalable infrastructure in the three major public clouds AWS, GCP and Azure and also leveraging on-premise storage.
The Snowflake Data Cloud ensures that data and business logic can be easily shared and transferred across clouds and regions. This is made possible by one of the technology layers in Snowflake called “Snowgrid”. The Snowgrid technology layer helps organizations with three key capabilities, “cross-cloud collaboration”, “cross-cloud data governance” and “cross-cloud business continuity”. These three key capabilities are explained below.
- cross-cloud collaboration — ability to share live, ready-to-query data — along with data services and applications — across clouds and across regions without any ETL
- cross-cloud data governance — simplifies governance at scale, ensuring that organizations comply with international regulations and have unified visibility across their ecosystem
- cross-cloud business continuity — ability to replicate data and more across clouds and regions, unlocking greater resiliency and minimizing business disruptions in the event of a disaster
Snowflake is a pioneer when it comes to supercloud; the approach is notable as it combines the benefits of a supercloud infrastructure with the benefits of a traditional public cloud platform. The Data Cloud using Snowgrid and all its capabilities around cross-cloud collaboration, data governance, and business continuity are part of Snowflake’s single, unified platform. This means that organizations can have a unified experience across clouds and regions, protecting data at cloud scale to operate more efficiently and collaborate globally in new ways to further innovate and mobilize data.
To read more about SuperCloud, Snowflake and Snowgrid please visits the links below
https://wikibon.com/supercloud-definition-3-0/
https://www.snowflake.com/blog/new-snowgrid-cross-cloud-capabilities/
https://www.snowflake.com/en/data-cloud/platform/
// Alexander & Konstantin