How was Snowflake Summit 2023 and is it worth it?
Last week of June 2023, there was snowing in Las Vegas. No, don’t worry this is not an intro into the new post-apocalyptic movie where this desert will be turned into the winter land. But there was held the Snowflake Summit — the data event of the year. Snowflake Summit is annual Snowflake conference which brings all the data professionals from all around the world to this city of lights for a week long networking, learning and observing and absorbing what everything Snowflake has made over the last year. Snowflake Summit usually set the scene for upcoming year in terms of new features and everyone starts thinking how to integrate them into their data solutions. This year was not an exception.
I would like to have a look on Summit from different angles in this blog post. It will include my personal experience as a Data Superhero, but also experience of regular visitor who wants to get maximum from this week long data festive. I would like to share some key points why I think it is worth to come to similar conferences in 2023, even though you can find almost everything on-line. What I don’t want to do in this blog post is detailed deep dive into introduced features, but let me share blogs from my fellow data superheroes who covered the Summit from features point of view very well.
Snowflake Summit and new announcements
Even before coming to the Snowflake Summit I had a feeling that main topic of this year will be AI and large language models (LLM). Well, I wasn’t wrong. This is huge trend and hype of last months and I was personally very keen to know what will come and how this concept will be integrated into the Data Cloud. It has started already on Monday with announcement of the partnership between Snowflake and Nvidia, and continued over the last week with several sessions about building own LLM models or integrating the existing ones together with Snowflake.
If you would like to get a complete overview of introduced features I can recommend to go through the series written by me fellow Data Superhero Daan Bakboord. He goes trough the announcements and divide them into several categories — Data Governance, Generative AI, Data Superheroes perspective, etc. You can find some of the posts on Snowflake medium publication. 👇
Or another Snowflake Summit summary from Ian Whitestone (SELECT Co-founder) 👇
And one more from Umesh Patel👇
Summit in general
Snowflake Summit was a bigger than last year (12 000 attendees, over 500 sessions) and I would also say better organised (e.g. possibility to reserve a seat). This year, it had two main venues where the sessions and keynotes took apart. It was extended to Ceasars Palace, along with the Ceasars Forum where Summit was also last year. This year, you had to be better in planning because both venues are 15 mins of walking from each other. It is not far away, but if you have to do it three or four times per day, it takes you a lot of valuable time. Not speaking about dealing with very hot Vegas weather in June. ☀️
Expo center remained in Ceasars Forum and it was still divided into East and West part. I would say that everything was way bigger this year. For instance Data Heroes Hub was two or three times bigger than last year. Or I have a personal feeling that number of hands-on lab sessions was bigger than last year, but I do not have any concrete numbers.
Generally I would say the Summit was organised pretty well. Everywhere were friendly staff waiting to help you find your next session or meals. What could be better is managing the lines. Many times it wasn’t clear if this is walk-in line or reserved line, where is end of line, etc. I would also add one more feature to Summit app and that is mark a session as my favourite one. You could reserve the seat and then you had the session in your agenda. But If it was already full, there was no other way how to mark it for yourself and you had to go through whole agenda again and again. I just downloaded my favourite sessions into my calendar and use that instead.
The number of partner happy hours and parties has also significantly exploded this year. Almost each night there were at least 3 or 4 different events in same time and you had a plenty of opportunities to meet others over drink or great food.
Summit and me
This was my second in person Snowflake Summit. I attended the event also in 2022 together with 2 pandemic years when the Summit was online event only. This year was different as I wasn’t only the regular visitor but together with other fellow Data Superheroes we had a panel discussion about Optimizing Snowflake Performance and Cost.
The Data Heroes Theater was full for our session, so hopefully audience enjoyed it in the same way like we did on the stage. We wanted to highlight the biggest pains related to cost optimization and how to start with this discipline. But we had only 20 minutes so there was not much time to go in details, just to mention the key points. Being a speaker was definitely one of the highlights of the week for me.
I was also conference attendee eager to learn as much as possible during whole week, especially in domains which interests me — Modern Data Stack & Architectures, Data Engineering, Data Governance, Performance optimization and of course AI&LLM together with all new announcements. It is quite a lot for a week, isn’t it? I didn’t managed all my planned sessions, it was obvious because many of them were overlapping. Thanks a lot for a recordings! I have a chance to catch up with what I missed. Proper planning is always necessary, especially this year when the majority of the sessions were spread between two venues. So you had to be careful in planning and minimise the time for moving back and forth. In the end I managed to see many sessions from each category and I got a lot of food for thoughts. It is always like that — you are trying to absorb us much us possible during sessions — making notes, photos, discuss the topic with others. But there is no time for any deeper thinking or analysis what it actually means. How can I leverage that? Is there a benefit for my use cases and deliveries? This is always task for coming weeks and months. Especially for newly introduced features. The session is always packed with so many info and properly tuned demo, but there is so much to learn behind that cool announcement.
Partner booths are an integral part of such events like Snowflake Summit is. It’s a great opportunity to look around the market and possibly find new tools which you can integrate into your technology stack. I like to walk around the expo hall and visiting the boots of companies which I already know and use. Just to check what they are working on, what new features we can expect. Apart from big names and known companies I also want to visit the small booths which are many times runs by startups and new players. You can find there something innovative and same booth could be three times bigger in year or two. One example could be Dataiku. I remember their booth at AWS re:Invent 2019 and look today — one of the major Snowflake Summit Partners and one of the biggest booth.
Data Superheroes
I’ve been member of this amazing community for 4 years. Attending Summit as a data superheroes is one of the perks which this membership has. We have been treated very well by Howard, Elsa & Leith a.k.a Snowflake Community team. Same like last year, we had our annual Data Superheroes reception, but this year it was even more special as Snowflake Co-Founders Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes have come to say hello and spend some time with us. I mean this was super cool and sweet that they have found a time in their busy schedules and visited us. But that was not all.
There was Builder’s keynote on Wednesday morning and we had reserved seating right next to the stage also with special thank you to the community from Benoit. It is nice to see how the community and all the work around is appreciated at so many occasions and even by leadership team. Community work got even more space on builders keynote. Benoit mentioned Frosty Friday — Snowflake challenges made by Christopher Marland and Mike Droog. The idea which they had on last Summit.
To top it off, we also have had a opportunities to meet with some product managers and discuss the latest features in person. We have these sessions regularly online but possibility to meet in-person is always great. Apart from those official events, there was a lot of opportunities to discuss Snowflake, Summit, our own use cases or just life over coffees, drinks or meals. Being together always add and extra dimension to all the community work and online meetings which we are part of during whole year.
Special thanks to Snowflake Community team — Howard, Elsa, Leith, Waqas and others behind for running the community, taking care of us during Summit week and also supporting us during whole year. 👍
Is it worth coming?
Short answer — YES! But I would like to give you more background why I think it is worth to come to Snowflake Summit or similar conference related to your interest. For me it has multiple levels:
Validate your work
Conferences are full of best practices, architectures from others including big players and new announcements. Vendors usually want to show the best what their customers & partners do. For you, it is a great opportunity to validate your own projects and deliveries against those best practises and shared examples. Do we use this feature? Why don’t we apply this architecture principle? This is cool, we do it in same way, etc.
Meeting people
Networking has become probably the most important part for me. Being able to meet with so many people which I am in touch only virtually during whole year is priceless. Suddenly you can share the knowledge more easily or just have a chat. I have met so many old friends from Data Superheroes community, partner booths or just regular visitors. In the same time I have met so many new ones. This year I have been also approached by some of my students who participated in my O’Reilly courses and this was super exciting to hear the feedback live. 🙏
Motivate & inspire yourself
All of that works as great motivator (at least for me). Once I come back, I am always full of new ideas and plans how to do this and that. What new features I would like to learn and integrate. I am trying to follow those principles or just learn how others have solved same challenges which I am facing off.
All the vibe and energy
There is always great vibe and energy at corridors, in the lines, at partner booths, everywhere. Everyone wants to learn something new and is willing to share their own experiences. That openness always fascinates me. You have so many professionals gathered at same place and time. And majority of them are open to share their knowledge. It is just on you, how you are gonna leverage that.
Gain a new knowledge
And all of that combined — you will gain a new knowledge. From the sessions, from the discussions with others, from the demos at partner booths.
It is always exhausting week for me as I do not sleep much, work a long days and also exercise a lot (my daily steps counts always exploding 🚶). But it is still 100% worth it.
With that, I hope to see you all again next year in San Francisco at Snowflake Summit 2024.❄️
