I heard from everyone that Snowflake Summit was the most amazing event of the year, and I must say that it truly lived up to its reputation. I was amazed by the incredible level of innovation presented by Snowflake, as well as the enthusiasm of their customers for the ecosystem. As anticipated, the Bluesky team was out in full force for the occasion.
Our booth was ready to rock with demos for customers and we hosted two sessions featuring Megha Gupta from Notion and Rex Walker from Intuitive, which were jam-packed. We also had a blockbuster after-party that was planned for 35 and ended up at 90 people. We would like to express our gratitude to the customers, partners, and Snowflake employees who participated in and supported us during Summit.
But this blog post is not about Bluesky, but instead on the remarkable innovations presented at Snowflake Summit, with a few subtle hints about possible future developments from Bluesky. The show started off with a star-studded keynote by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, moderated by Sarah Guo, Founder of Conviction. During the keynote, a partnership between Snowflake and NVIDIA was announced giving customers new ways to build custom generative AI applications simply and securely within their Snowflake environment. This was an amazing session, showing how well Snowflake embraces new technology in the broader ecosystem and how NVIDIA has become THE arms dealer for AI.
Although the keynote on the first day was impressive, it paled in comparison to the second day's product announcements, which were the most innovative, had the most demos, and generated the most excitement among our team. Snowflake’s focus on platform innovations and ecosystem integration opportunities is why customers love their platform so much. With that, we wanted to sum up the 3 innovations you must know about from Snowflake Summit 2023.
This is one of the coolest announcements at Summit. For those that missed the announcement, Snowpark Container Services (SPCS) is a fully managed container offering that allows customers to deploy, manage, and scale containerized services, jobs, and functions, all within the security and governance boundaries of Snowflake. Customers get all the benefits of Snowflake’s native security and built-in configurations with zero management.
The net result is the ability to run any application in Snowflake leveraging Docker container images with the addition of new object models, including images, image registry, image repositories, compute pools, specification files, services, and jobs, as you would see in a normal Docker environment. This makes it easy for customers to create applications and also third-party applications to run entire application runtime environments or services, which can be purchased via the Snowflake Marketplace. For more information, please check out Caleb Baechtold’s amazing blog post, Snowpark Container Services — A Tech Primer.
To show off this service and take things to an entirely new level, Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake, showcased 10, yes 10, demos of solutions running simultaneously in SPCS. Each solution is being demoed live behind each of the logos shown in the photo above. As a demo enthusiast, I have to say I was super impressed! SPCS is currently in private preview, but expect to see Bluesky as an offering in SPCS in the very near future, so customers can take advantage of our entire offering from Marketplace running in their own secure environment..
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Native Apps Public Preview announcement is BIG for customers and solution providers in the Snowflake ecosystem. While the Snowflake Native Application Framework was initially introduced at Snowflake Summit 2022, we are excited to see this move into public preview at Summit this year with a few new additions. Native Application Framework allows:
Native apps will give solutions such as Bluesky the ability to distribute their applications on Snowflake Marketplace as prebuilt applications versus providing scripts of functions that customers need to run in their own environment. The biggest win is that applications run within customers’ Snowflake accounts so that no data is shared with services outside the account, removing much of the security assessment required for third-party services. We are diligently working on adding our recent announcement of Bluesky Estimate, giving you the ability to understand your optimization potential in minutes, as a native app on the Snowflake Marketplace, so keep an eye out for an upcoming announcement.
It is obvious at this point that NVIDIA is the biggest arms dealer for AI-focused companies, but I was delighted to see this partnership unfold. We are in the early innings of this relationship, but at the end of the day, the partnership enables customers to bring massive amounts of computing close to their data in Snowflake. This is a game changer for customers looking to build generative AI solutions, as you can leverage the security and governance of the Snowflake data cloud versus spinning up separate environments and managing them.
In addition, customers can now leverage NVIDIA NeMo framework for developing large language models (LLMs) for advanced generative AI services, including chatbots, search, and summarization. The huge value here is you can build and customize LLMs without moving data or proprietary information, as it all remains fully secured and governed within the Snowflake platform. We are excited to play around with this technology in Bluesky to help further our solution as a Co-Pilot for Snowflake. More to come!
So excited for next year! Until next time, build more and stay optimized, my friends!
