Snowflake Cost Governance
Snowflake Cost Governance
Snowflake Data Cloud is Software as a Service (SaaS) and as such it has various cost metrics. They are different from those which you might know from traditional or legacy data providers. As a SaaS solution there is no license to buy or hardware to select. All you need to do is just sign-up for your account. Snowflake has pay as you go model and you only pay for what you really use. It utilizes the per second billing. Processing time is charged on that basis.
Snowflake has its own invoiceable unit called Snowflake credit. Its price varies based on your Snowflake edition, cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) and the cloud region where your account is provisioned. Snowflake is cloud agnostic solution and thus it is available on all major cloud providers, giving customers the opportunity to select the provider based on their needs.
Cost Governance
Snowflake cost optimization and governance are also challenging due to Snowflake’s pricing model. Snowflake offers a scalable solution, but your cost can also scale to very unpleasant levels.
Waste isn't good for any business. Instead of spinning cycles on deteriorated SQL queries, the data cloud provider would rather have you focus those Snowflake credits towards projects like building data apps. These types of projects provide higher value to your business and make their solution stickier and lead to more sustainable increased consumption in the long-term.
Visibility Is a Key Pillar of Snowflake Cost Governance
A lack of timely visibility into current costs and the inability to forecast future costs leads to cost overruns and blown budgets, which is why having a product that surfaces the most up-to-date insights on your workloads, monitors your usage and recommends corrective action is important.
Timely visibility and monitoring your budget fall under financial control of your cloud—one of the three pillars of cloud governance. Cloud governance includes the development and implementation of budget controls, as well as controls to manage access and ensure ongoing compliance.. A data cloud management product can help with this by not only keeping your budget under control and alerting you before you go over that budget, but also by finding saving opportunities through ongoing optimization.