Snowflake vs. Redshift: which cloud computing tool is best?

Both cloud computing solutions can make your company work infinitely better with your data.

But first, you need to know some of the main differences, especially in terms of architecture, scalability, performance and price, in order to choose the right one.

And that's what you're going to read in this article.

Have a good read, and count on Indicium to help you decide on the best cloud computing tools for your business.

What is the best cloud computing tool for Indicium?

In an increasingly digital world, processing power and data storage capacity have become competitive differentiators for companies that have woken up to this.

In this context, cloud computing plays a central role in providing speed and security for organizations' data.

But choosing the ideal cloud solution for your company can be a challenge, especially with so many possibilities on the market.

With this in mind, we present two of the main solutions that are leaders in the cloud computing market: Snowflake and Redshift.

We'll show you the main differences between them in four respects:

1. architecture;
2. scalability;
3. performance;
4. and prices.

But first, take a look at the concepts of cloud computing and data cloud.

What are cloud computing and data cloud?

The concept of cloud computing refers to the use of cloud applications with information technology resources. Instead of your company buying and maintaining data centers and physical servers, cloud computing offers advantages such as:

• using the computing capacity of renowned providers such as Amazon, Snowflake, Google and Microsoft;
• greater speed, security and scalability to meet the company's demands;
• preventing data loss.

A datacloud offers these advantages:

• data storage and processing in the cloud;
• elimination of data silos and fluid integration;
• transforming data into monetizable resources;
• alignment with the concept of cloud computing.

Today, there are many data cloud on the market with differentiating features that can help a company mine the value of existing data in a faster, more scalable and secure way.

And two of the most important data cloud solutions are Redshift e Snowflake.

Let's get to it!

Redshift x Snowflake

Know who's who in the data clouds.

Snowflake

It is an advanced data platform that allows you to store, process and analyze data in a fast, flexible and scalable way.

One of its distinguishing features is that it is a self-managing platform. This means there's no need to set up hardware (physical or virtual), install complicated software or manage and maintain complex data infrastructures.

Because it runs completely on a cloud infrastructure, Snowflake enables fast and uncomplicated delivery of its full value potential, removing the need for highly trained professionals and making it a more affordable solution.

It's important to note that this tool is built on other cloud services, such as: AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Azure making it a multi-cloud data warehouse solution that makes the most of the multiple clouds on the market.

Redshift

It is a cloud data warehouse that is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) family of services.

Redshift enables scalability and its performance delivers high-speed data storage and processing.

Typically, your service is charged based on the allocation of contracted clusters . However, with Redshift Serverless the billing system is optimized to bill only for the service time used.

Setting up and configuring the tool can require a lot of engineering resources and more technical knowledge. This makes its implementation a little more complex, as it requires the work of an engineer or data engineer.

However, its integration with other Amazon services makes Redshift a very complete and integrated cloud computing tool . See Table 1 for a summary of the main detailed features of these two data clouds.

O Snowflake is differentiated by the separation of storage and processing, which allows for fast scalability and consistent performance.

So, even in situations of intense load, such as during a massive marketing campaign for your company, the Snowflake is able to perform well both for storing new records and for processing queries.

Redshift is second to none when it comes to speed and performance. Because it is built on an architecture based on clusters (for processing) and independent nodes (for storage), it is highly optimized for complex queries on large volumes of data.

Architecture: Snowflake or Redshift?

Snowflake uses a shared cloud data warehouse architecture, allowing multiple organizations to access the same resources in an isolated and secure way.

Because it is built on top of other cloud services, it is a multi-cloud data warehouse solution that acts as an intermediary, absorbing risks and optimizing storage and processing.

Redshift , on the other hand, is based on a Massively Parallel Processing architecture, in which data is distributed among computing nodes for parallel processing.

Thus, a certain proficiency in more technical data warehouse issues is required to configure the clusters and nodes in order to scale the system's processing and storage to an optimized performance.

Scalability: Snowflake or Redshift?

Snowflake offers automatic scalability, making it possible to increase or decrease resources according to demand, without interrupting data storage in the data warehouse.

Thus, the scalability of data processing is not linked to an increase in storage (and storage costs).

Similarly, Redshift allows you to scale vertically (increase the size of instances) and horizontally (add nodes) to handle larger workloads.

However, resizing clusters on it can cause some momentary system downtime, impacting availability.

Furthermore, in Redshift, the increase in storage necessarily implies an increase in data processing costs due to its architecture.

Prices: Snowflake or Redshift?

As for pricing, Snowflake operates with a more granular model, charging separately for data storage and processing through purchased credits.

So his cost structure runs as follows:

• processing usage: charging for computing resources used to execute queries in the database(pay-per-query).
  

• storage usage: calculation independent of processing; storage pricing is calculated according to the volume of terabytes of monthly data stored.
  

Snowflake uses compression and data storage optimization to reduce costs.

On the other hand, Redshift has a pricing structure based on instances and time of use, in a pay-as-you-go model, where only what has been consumed is charged.

Its pricing can be broken down into the following components:

• processing usage: typically, it will be charged based on the number and types of nodes in a cluster used per hour; it is possible to choose between on-demand charging (according to usage) or long-term contracts for reserved instances.

• storage usage: combined costs for storage and processing, which simplifies the pricing model; costs are based on node types and cluster size.

• concurrency scaling: this feature allows you to better manage peaks in queries or tasks, as this extra processing power is triggered when many queries need to be executed, avoiding a reduction in cloud speed, and you pay according to usage; when this feature is no longer needed, the tool removes the additional clusters and stops charging.

See the table below for a simulation comparing a load of 1 Tb/month of storage in the tools. This takes into account 2 hours of ELT per day and 8 hours of analytics per day, with 50 users.

Simulating a total of 20 queries per user/day over 30 days in a month, you can see that Snowflake has a monthly cost of 768 dollars, while Redshift costs 806 dollars.

If you would like more information on how much it would cost to implement Snowflake in your company, Indicium can tell you a lot including pricing.

Snowflake or Redshift: which is best for your company?

Different companies have different data cloud needs, and finding the solution that best fits your business is essential to extracting maximum value from the cloud.

‍So, to conclude this comparison, we've compiled some recommendations that can help you decide on the best data cloud for your company.

Snowflake

With its multi-cloud solution and more intuitive implementation, it encompasses many of the benefits of AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure. And it is preferred by startups, small and medium-sized businesses because it has a billing system that separates storage and processing.

Snowflake also plays a great role in large companies and companies with major concerns about data security and privacy. It therefore fits very well in sectors such as finance and healthcare.

Redshift

As part of Amazon's family of services, it has flawless integration with the AWS ecosystem, which makes Redshift a very attractive option for companies using, for example, S3 or AWS Glue.

In addition, it is very efficient at scaling large masses of data and provides many security features for handling sensitive data, such as e-commerce transaction data, for example.

Indicium can help you

Indicium is the only company in Brazil certified as a Snowflake Select Partner, and we act in US and Brazil.

And to implement either Snowflake or Redshift we know how to assess exactly what your company needs in its data operation and calculate the value of that investment.

Counting on a specialized partnership brings significant benefits and speeds up processes.

Contact Indicium by clicking here to receive personalized advice and start working on solutions tailored to your specific needs.

Snowflake and Redshift are two cloud computing tools that offer speed, security, high processing power and data storage.

Which is better?

It depends.