Snowflakes are unique. And although Snowflake Inc. was named for its founders’ love of the ski slopes rather than its innovative database, Snowflake is unlike any other cloud data platform around.

Setting the stage for the start of Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit, Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, asked three of Snowflake’s founding engineers what it was like creating the platform that led to the biggest initial public offering in United States history.

“There was always this tendency and this impulse that we needed to think big and think differently and not see the world the way it is, but the way we wanted it to be — and then work our way backward and try to make it happen,” said Abdul Munir (pictured, left), senior engineering manager and founding engineer at Snowflake.

Munir and fellow Snowflake foundering engineers Ashish Motivala (pictured, center), senior engineering manager, and Allison Lee (pictured, right), director of engineering, discussed some of the obvious, and not so obvious, decisions that they made while building the Snowflake cloud data platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Striving for simplicity leads to complex decisions with knock-on effects

Aiming for simplicity was an obvious decision “because everybody wants their system to be easy to use,” according to Lee. But fulfilling that philosophy led to many choices that weren’t so easy to call.

One controversial decision that shaped the platform was separating compute and storage.

“There are so many features that we have today; for instance, data sharing, zero-copy cloning, that we couldn’t have without that architecture … [but] when we told people about it in the early days, there was definitely skepticism about being able to make that work, ” Lee stated.

Another important move was deciding to use the distributed NoSQL database FoundationDB instead of the more traditional MySQL. “That was a big game-changer for us,” Motivala said.

The decision wasn’t made easily, or fast. “For the longest time we even had our own little branch called FoundationDB, and everybody was developing on that branch,” Motivala added.

Building a database from scratch was a humongous task, and one not many people could have done, according to Motivala. “The way Snowflake has built a database, it’s really a number of organs that come together and form the body, and that’s also a concept that’s novel to the database industry,” he said.

“We weren’t going to borrow a single line of code from any other database out there, and this was something that really shocked a lot of people,” Munir said. “Many thought that this was pretty crazy; and it was. But this is how you build great products.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Cloud Summit 2020. Neither Snowflake Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE