Snowflake Computing has confirmed that Snowflake for Azure is immediately available for preview on Microsoft Azure.
The American cloud data warehousing startup, co-founded by Marcin Zuckowski, Benoit Dageville, and Thierry Cruanes in 2012 spent two years in stealth mode before launching publicly in 2014.
Snowflake has raised $463 million (£350.3 million) in growth funding with its pre-money valuation at $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) over the past five years.
Their data warehousing platform is currently also available in a number of Amazon Web Services regions while continuing to expand geographically.
Demand from customers has prompted Snowflake to offer it on Azure as an option to run the company’s cloud-built data warehouse.
Thibaut Ceyrolle, Vice President for Sales in Snowflake’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations told Computer Business Review:
“We started discussions with Microsoft one year ago although the two cloud platforms had different technology architectures.
“We wanted to replicate the same kind of feel on Azure as we did with AWS as people who work with those platforms work with their own infrastructure.”
Snowflake for Azure – How Does It Work?
The platform uses most of Azure’s new features, including limitless storage accounts, accelerated networking and storage soft delete.
Snowflake for Azure uses Azure Blob Storage for data storage as it strips customer data across many storage accounts.
Customer requests go through a virtual warehouse, a set of virtual machines Snowflake provision for Azure Compute that are dedicated to a single customer’s account.
Other services that can be used on Snowflake for Azure include Azure Data Lake Store and visualising the analytics results on PowerBI.
Connecting Snowflake to PowerBI involves installing the Snowflake ODBC driver on your machine to use the built-in company source.
Corey Sanders, Vice President for Azure Compute at Microsoft added:
“We look forward to partnering with Snowflake to enable these data warehouse migrations for enterprise customers moving onto Microsoft Azure. I am excited to have Snowflake available on the Azure platform.”
Snowflake is currently available to Preview in the US East 2 region although the European market will be available to access Snowflake for Azure by the end of the year.
