Now let’s start the process of creating a snowflake account in the Azure Cloud. You can sign up for a free trial from here – https://signup.snowflake.com/ I am going to bypass this and go straight to the setup screens. (This is slightly different because as an org-admin I have the power to create accounts)
Select the cloud provider and edition you require; we have already discussed these options before. You know me, its going to be Azure but feel free to dive into AWS or GCP.
At the most basic level, Snowflake has 3 important components. The Cloud services layer, centralised storage layer and the compute layer.
You have decided that snowflake is the technology you want to use to build your next gen data platform, you have decided your cloud provider (Azure, AWS, GCP) then next you need to think about what edition of snowflake suits your business needs?
Time to shift gears away from the world of relational databases whether that is in the cloud, on-prem, Linux-based, containers or even sitting within Kubernetes. Everyone has heard of Synapse. They face stiff competition from the likes of Snowflake. Snowflake does not really have this concept of Control and compute nodes like within the Microsoft world to build out this MPP based architecture.
Hello Readers – I wanted to make sure those who follow my blog have heard about the new MVP led training initiative started by Paul Andrew (@mrpaulandrew). It’s called Cloud Formations (@CloudFormsLtd) and seems to be positioned to follow in the footsteps of what ex-MVP, turned Microsoft Program Manager Chris Webb (@cwebb_bi) once did with Technitrain. For those old enough to remember from Chris’ blog archive: https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/category/technitrain/
Storage Accounts are pretty much integrated into so many different designs in Azure, whether you are using Azure Synapse, 3rd party product like Snowflake, or Event Streaming designs – we need it.
I really like scale sets. It lets you create and manage up to 1000 load balanced VMs per availability zone using windows or Linux images. (We can have flexible or uniforms modes for orchestration which dictates if you go down the homogenous VM route or a mix, where a mix is the flexible option.
There are many different family groups for Azure VMs each with its own purpose. Below is a summary of what can be selected. This is important because for example if you are running complex OLTP database servers then very likely you will go for Memory optimised machines, right? We know SQL server loves RAM. Any ways here is the list:
Lets write about Microsoft Azure, specially the area of high availability when it comes to virtual machines.
A post close to my heart, Azure SQL Managed Instance, I have blogged about this many times but I feel I should be sharing more details about this. One important topic – Maintenance windows.
All About Data 