Amazon Web Services vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Web Services
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools.
$0
per month
Snowflake
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.N/A
Pricing
Amazon Web ServicesSnowflake
Editions & Modules
Free Tier
$0
per month
Basic Environment
$100 - $200
per month
Intermediate Environment
$250 - $600
per month
Advanced Environment
$600-$2500
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Web ServicesSnowflake
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAWS allows a “save when you commit” option that offers lower prices when you sign up for a 1- or 3- year term that includes an AWS service or category of services.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Web ServicesSnowflake
Features
Amazon Web ServicesSnowflake
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Web Services
8.2
Ratings
2% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images6.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
User Ratings
Amazon Web ServicesSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Web ServicesSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
We are using RDS for the database services. With RDS, we don't have to manage much, as most of the DBA tasks are automated. For development purposes, we are using Kubernetes pods, which makes it easy to deploy applications and scale up as needed. AWS integration with in-house applications is seamless, making it easy to keep a data-sensitive application on-premises while still utilizing AWS services.
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If you need a quick query, snowflake is the way to go. It's super simple and scalable; we were struggling before with Azure, and with Snowflake, everything runs smoothly, and we have more control over our schemas and warehouses. Snowflake, in my opinion, is the next step when you want to scale your business and manage data. If your company is still small, there may be cheaper options.
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Pros
  • Starting an instance and accessing it for testing purpose, demo or production deployment its always easy.
  • All the things which are available over AWS are pretty well managed and easy to use.
  • You might find everything you required for an product and other development over AWS.
  • Its suitable for both either an enterprise or an startup
  • Various resources and documentation are available in case you struck somewhere.
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  • Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
  • Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
  • Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
  • Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
  • Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
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Cons
  • The AWS Management Console can be overwhelming. so a better dashboard and organizing it would improve usability.
  • The pricing models are complex. We need a more clear price calculators and cost management tools to manage our expenses better.
  • Enhancements in cross service compatibility and easier third party integrations could streamline workflow.
  • Simplifying model training in SageMaker and improving IAM for granular access control would make AWS more user friendly
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  • Add constraints for views and not just for tables
  • Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.
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Likelihood to Renew
I would gladly rely on AWS for any large-scale application deployment. For prototyping and small-scale applications, a more heavily managed environment on top of the 'bare metal' virtual infrastructure, such as Heroku or Elastic Bean Stalk, is probably a more productive approach in most cases
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SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
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Usability
Amazon Web Services is a great tool when it comes to middle size organizations like us. It provides multiple tools and functionalities in low costs. The best feature we have to pay as we go. No financial burden on company for the unused instances. It also comes with greater level of security such as two level authorization such as multi factor authorization.
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The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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Reliability and Availability
Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to
immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a
good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of
company because of its affordability and ease of use.
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We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
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Implementation Rating
The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
In my personal experience, AWS is superior to both GCP and Azure in the majority of usable applications. GCP suffers from the near total misunderstanding of how support system is even supposed to work, and while _some_ services are pretty nifty and well-polished, some are mindbogglingly designed black boxes with self-conflicting documentation. Some of it comes from having legacy systems, sure, but AWS somehow manages, even having a rather big lead start. Azure, from my limited experience, is limited to people somehow coerced into its usage by external constraints. That being said, IF you can design and implement something there, it will probably run fine.
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Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can buy according to your needs. And the integration options with various tools like Sigma are add-ons.
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Return on Investment
  • Provisioning resources like large database instances is really quick. We can easily scale our instances up or down as per need.
  • Storing files in S3 instead of onprem NAS drives is much more economical, especially for the files stored in glacier deep archive for compliance purposes.
  • Backup snapshots of EBS volumes and RDS instances may increase the cost of cloud if not cleaned up properly.
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  • With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
  • Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
  • Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.
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ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation