Snowflake Cost Optimization: Maximize Your Investment While Improving Performance

Build a customized roadmap that makes sense for your business and protects you from overspending.

Jan. 31, 2024 | By Shishir Shrivastava

In the last article, we weighed the pros and cons of lift and shift versus platform modernization. Each approach has its benefits. The lift and shift method brings speed to market and automation opportunities, while platform modernization is a multifaceted journey that improves the following:

• Business performance gains
• Long-term cost benefits
• Risk mitigation
• Processing speed

What many customers don’t realize, however, is that reaping the benefits of platform modernization requires a strategy to optimize Snowflake’s capabilities. When you create a roadmap of metrics critical to your business, you will be able to track how much time and money you’ve saved since phasing out your legacy platform.

Data Migration Strategy: Intentionality Is Crucial

Creating a customized plan for your organization will not only enable you to optimize the platform but allow for a smooth transition to the future state of AI. So where do you start, and what should you consider?

1. Scope of task: Be thorough in your migration planning because overlooked components can lead to project delays and unexpected costs.
2. Proof of concept / proof of value migration: Conduct a trial migration with a small subset of data and users. Validate the process and address issues before migrating the entire data set.
3. Migration in phases: Once the scope gets finalized, start planning the migration in stages. That way, you can migrate specific modules, departments or functionalities one at a time.
4. Scaled efforts: Phases can define the guardrails of migration and provide true expectations based on scope and resources.

Cost Optimization Strategy: Zoom In on the Details

As migration scales further, customers often ask us how to improve performance and optimize cost. Snowflake has one of the most flexible and loosely coupled architectures, and there are plenty of opportunities to tune cost.

The following strategies will help you efficiently manage resources, control expenses and maximize the value of your investment.

• Sizing virtual warehouses: Adjust the size (scaling) of your virtual warehouses based on workload demand. Use smaller warehouses during periods of lower activity and scale up during peak times based on workloads and usage patterns.
• Storage: Snowflake provides auto compression features; large data sets get compressed to a large extent, which lowers the storage costs. Plan to archive / have a cold backup of processed data, which may not be used in the future.
• Automation: Consider using auto-suspend and auto-resume features to automatically pause and resume warehouses based on usage patterns.
• Governance: Identify underutilized or overutilized resources and adjust configurations accordingly.
• Configurations: Allocate resources more efficiently by ensuring that each workload gets the appropriate level of performance.
• Monitoring: Regularly monitor the credit usage, query execution patterns, user behavior and warehouse usages to keep the costs under control.
• Data modeling techniques: Follow the best practices and ergonomic architectural patterns to make seamless data movement. Remember, complicated designs put loads on the system and eventually cost lots of money.
• Design principles: Avoid creating multiple copies of data; instead, leverage views. Use materialized views to precompute and store aggregations.

TEK Tip: Leverage the power of Snowflake with features like data sharing, query profiling and optimization and information views. System metadata provides clear insight into areas of tuning.

 

By adopting these cost optimization strategies, organizations can maximize the efficiency of their Snowflake deployment, ensure cost-effectiveness and achieve better value from their data analytics investments. Regularly reviewing and adjusting strategies based on evolving usage patterns and business requirements is essential for ongoing cost optimization.

Platform Modernization Expertise

At TEKsystems, we take your business and budget seriously. No matter which cloud provider you’re working with—AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft—we can partner with you to help create a customized strategy for your organization.