Most public cloud provider solutions require you to be logged in to the administrative portal to provision an instance of a data warehouse or database service. Snowflake’s approach is different. With Snowflake, there is a single and consistent entry point for users, which reduces complexity and administrative overhead.
Once you sign up for a Snowflake account, you’ll be provided with a unique URL ending in Snowflakecomputing.com, and once the instance has been created, you really don’t need to know about the underlying cloud platform. The mapping is managed by Snowflake. Also, Snowflake delivers a single data experience across multiple clouds and regions.
Once you fill out the information on the first screen, you’ll need to make choices about the type of Snowflake edition, the cloud provider, and the region. There are factors to consider when making these choices. You’ll probably want to choose the same public cloud and region where most of your data applications reside since that will make it easier and less costly to manage data transfers should you need to do so.
Table C-1 summarizes the major differences in the Snowflake editions. If you are signing up for a Snowflake ...
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