Snowday 2023 - Recap

Snowday Announcements focused on Application Development: Snowpark Container Services, Snowflake Native Apps, Hybrid Tables and more!

These new features include programming language and hardware flexibility from Snowpark Container Services, as well as the ability to build, distribute and monetize full-stack apps with the Snowflake Native App Framework, the ability to leverage transactional and analytical data together with Hybrid Tables and DevOps capabilities including database change management capabilities, Git integration, Snowflake CLI and Event Tables.

An all-in-one data cloud service is built so that customers can use as an abstraction layer over public cloud services, data lakes, lakehouses, with app development, cost management, and governance capabilities services. Many of the new items are due soon!

The service/function names to look out for are Iceberg, Snowpark, Horizon, Cortex, Snowflake Native App Framework, Snowflake Notebooks, Powered by Snowflake Funding, and Cost Management Interface.

Iceberg

Snowflake has a coming public preview of its work to integrate external Apache Iceberg format tables with its SQL-based data warehouse, and allow access to Iceberg data from other data engines. It says Iceberg tables enable support of data architectures such as data lakes, data lakehouse, and data mesh, as well as the data warehouse.

Snowpark

Snowpark is a facility for the deployment and processing of non-SQL code. More than 35 percent of Snowflake’s customers use Snowpark on a weekly basis (as of September 2023), and it is also being employed by Python developers for complex ML model development and deployment. New functionality includes:

• Snowpark Container Services (public preview soon in select AWS regions)
• Snowflake Notebooks (private preview)
• Snowpark ML Modelling API (general availability soon)
• Snowpark Model Registry (public preview soon)

Snowflake Native App Framework

The Snowflake Native App Framework (general availability soon on AWS, public preview soon on Azure) provides customers with the building blocks for app development, including distribution, operation, and monetization within Snowflake’s platform.

Snowflake also announced the private preview of the Snowflake Native SDK for Connectors, which provides core library support, templates and documentation.

With Snowpark Container Services as part of Snowflake Native Apps (integration in private preview), developers can bring in existing containerized workloads, for an accelerated development cycle, or write app code in the language of their choice and package it as a container.

Horizon

With more data types and tables supported, Snowflake is expanding its Horizon governance capability, which looks after compliance, security, privacy, interoperability, and access capabilities in its Data Cloud. Horizon is getting:

• Additional Authorizations and Certifications
• Data Quality Monitoring (private preview)
• Data Lineage UI (private preview)
• Differential Privacy Policies (in development)
• Enhanced Classification of Data
• Trust Centre (private preview soon)

Cortex

Snowflake Cortex says (available in private preview) is an intelligent, fully managed service that offers access to AI models, LLMs, and vector search functionality to enable organizations to quickly analyze data and build AI applications. It gives users access to a growing set of serverless functions that enable inference on generative LLMs such as Meta’s Llama 2 model, task-specific models to accelerate analytics, and advanced vector search functionality.

Initial models include:

• Complete (in private preview): Users can pass a prompt and select the LLM they want to use. For the private preview, users will be able to choose between the three model sizes (7B, 13B, and 70B) of Llama 2.
• Text to SQL (in private preview): This generates SQL from natural language using the same Snowflake LLM that powers the Snowflake Copilot experience.

Streamlit in Snowflake (public preview):

With Streamlit, developer teams can accelerate the creation of LLM apps, with the ability to develop interfaces in just a few lines of Python code and no front-end experience required, we’re told. These apps can then be deployed and shared across an organization via unique URLs that use existing role-based access controls in Snowflake and can be generated with just a single click.

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