Among the many announcements at June’s Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas was an expansion of Snowflake Inc.’s Snowpark developer framework. The latest enhancement, Snowpark Container Services, allows developers to build using any programming language, such as Python and deploy the results on a broad range of infrastructure choices.

“This is a technology that really wasn’t possible not that long ago, this ability to run Python at your cloud data warehouse scale,” said Caitlin Colgrove (pictured, right), co-founder and chief technology officer at Hex Technologies Inc. “Before Snowpark, you had to make some hard choices. Either I’m going to use SQL and run it at scale, or I’m going to maybe use Python but I’m not going to have the same compute power available to me. Snowpark takes all of that away.”

Colgrove spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Torsten Grabs (left), senior director of product management at Snowflake, as they discussed the latest enhancements for Snowpark and their significance in the developer ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

Polyglot experience

Snowpark Container Services will expand Snowflake’s compute infrastructure to run various workloads, including full-stack applications. The release will also enable hosting of large language models, facilitate machine learning deployment and allow developers to run secure generative AI in the Snowflake Data Cloud. The array of new capabilities will also support cross-team collaboration within organizations, according to Grabs.

“How do you actually orchestrate a workflow that creates a machine learning model in Python in the data science team which is then being handed over to the analysts that are running this machine learning model in production in an SQL-based environment or that runs as part of a data pipeline?” Grabs asked. “That’s what we’re enabling through that polyglot Snowflake experience, that virtuous cycle between different teams to collaborate in their programming languages of choice.”

Hex Technologies, a platform for data science and analytics, was a design partner working with the product engineering team at Snowflake to add the latest enhancements to Snowpark. Hex’s participation was driven by an interest in solving the pain and fragmentation surrounding the workflow process.

“Both as builders, but also as users, we experienced the deep pain of data science workflows,” Colgrove said. “If you wanted to use SQL you had to go to one place, if you wanted to use Python you had to go to another place. What we were seeing really in the market was that all of the tools available were deeply fragmented and fragmented along lines that didn’t make any sense.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE