September 2025
Beginner
240 pages
6h 6m
English
Content preview from Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
11From Product to Platform
“Customers have a line item in their budget for a data warehouse.”
—Chris Degnan
EARLY IN THIS book we stated that our founding engineers realized they were building a data platform that could handle different types of data workloads, including cloud data warehousing. As a startup, Snowflake leadership made a strategic decision to position Snowflake as a data warehouse built for the cloud. Any prospect intent on analyzing their data had a data warehouse and had the budget to maintain their existing product and possibly upgrade to something new. Our exercise to determine our market position confirmed that Snowflake should be a cloud data warehouse. This decision served our customers and Snowflake well for about three years.
Two significant market forces caused us to rebrand Snowflake to what it really was—a cloud data platform, which is a solution that has many uses. The first market force is common with all products that are technologically diverse. Customers use your product based on how you position it. But their lens is not product-based, it’s problem- and opportunity-based. They buy solutions to solve data problems and create new business opportunities that never stop emerging. It makes sense they will leverage their existing solutions in ways beyond their malleable boundaries set by SaaS vendors’ product positioning. During our first few years, customers applied our product to workloads other than data warehousing. The product was already able ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.