Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

4Target One Competitor, for Now

“Thank God for Redshift.”

—Bob Muglia, CEO

AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) launched its service in 2006. Organizations could rent virtual computers and storage in the cloud to store their data and run their software applications. When work began in 2012 to build Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse, it was obvious to our founders that Snowflake should run on top of AWS as our first cloud infrastructure partner.

The engineers were working hard to develop our product when the announcement came. AWS launched Redshift—their own data warehouse for the cloud. We were still three years from GA. Worse, AWS charged rock-bottom prices for Redshift. It was practically included with the price they charged for their computing-as-a-service, which was the real cost we would have to pass on to our customers for eventually running Snowflake on AWS. This was not a new tactic in the tech industry. Long before the cloud was commercially available, behemoth hardware companies such as IBM created their own databases and structured their pricing to make it look like their software was free to customers. Not long after, in the 1990s, there was a series of application software companies that became the dominant players in their tech sectors. Many of them had solutions that didn’t work well but they had incredible influence over customers and deep pockets to market in ways that obscured their product deficiencies. Either way, these tech vendors had established a history of ...