Elastic cloud services

Snowflake's "Data Cloud", provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), enables data storage, processing, and analytic solutions in a performant, easy to use, and flexible manner. Although cloud service providers provide the foundational infrastructure to run and scale a variety of workloads, operating Snowflake on cloud infrastructure presents interesting challenges. Customers expect Snowflake to be available at all times and to run their workloads with high performance. Behind the scenes, the software that runs customer workloads needs to be serviced and managed. Additionally, failures in individual components such as Virtual Machines (VM) need to be handled without disrupting running workloads. As a result, lifecycle management of compute artifacts, their scheduling and placement, software rollout (and rollback), replication, failure detection, automatic scaling, and load balancing become extremely important.