Over the years, Snowflake Inc. has built its reputation as a cloud data management and warehouse provider. Yet, as the company builds out its Data Cloud, Snowflake has emerged as playing a much more central role in how enterprises will ultimately manage data-driven workloads.

The key building block for the Snowflake platform is the region, and what makes the company more than just another data warehouse provider is its ability to eliminate the burden of provisioning infrastructure, simplify access to data and allow information to be shared globally. The Data Cloud is also a data mesh, and through its regions, Snowflake is well on its way to becoming a robustly connected data network.

“We created a global data mesh, which connects every region so that not only the Snowflake system as a whole can be aware of all these regions, but customers can replicate data across regions and share data across the planet,” said Benoit Dageville (pictured, right), co-founder and president of products at Snowflake. “I call it the World Wide Web of data.”

Dageville spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit. He was joined by Christian Kleinerman (pictured, left), senior vice president of product at Snowflake, and they discussed how Snowflake abstracts the infrastructure and provides tools for developers to build on its platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Data domain owners

Users in Snowflake’s data mesh are essentially domain owners, building products and services while taking advantage of automated access control and governance. The company has tapped into a genuine enterprise need as customer desire to leverage the resources of multiple clouds has created its own set of complexities.

“Understanding each of the public cloud providers is a large undertaking,” Kleinerman said. “Each of them has 100-plus services, sending upgrades and updates on a constant basis. At the heart of everything we do is we abstract the infrastructure and the nuance of each of the cloud providers.”

One beneficiary of a less burdensome infrastructure is the developer who would rather spend time building key applications to run the business. Mindful of this important constituency, Snowflake recently announced Snowpark, a developer environment for data programming.

This latest move positions Snowflake as a place to write code and create data-optimized APIs on the company’s growing platform.

“We have increased the scope of the platform by adding Java computation and Snowpark,” Dageville said. “We estimate that 30% of our customers are running applications on top of our platform. The reason is because it’s so easy to get compute resources, there is no limit in scale and availability.”

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