Redshift’s RA3 allows you to decouple compute and storage costs as well, but most Redshift users have dc2, which doesn’t decouple. One key tip here before deploying would be to think about setting up different types of processes on different warehouses, so that you can scale the warehouse according to need.” One slight downside is that with Snowflake you need to keep an eye on “credit munching.” Andrew Ferrier in the dbt Slack community described working with Snowflake like this “On the flip side, we do munch through the credits, but most of this is due to optimizations that we can do on our side. can help ensure that you pay for only what you use. This credit system combined with relatively cheap storage costs - $40 per TB per month in the western U.S. You can use these credits for computing purposes and other features. Getting into the details, Snowflake uses credits whose costs fluctuate depending on the region you’re in - for instance, in the western United States, credits range from $2-$3. What this means is that storing data with Snowflake is cheap, and you pay only when you need to compute (i.e., use) that data. Redshift has tried to go this route, but, again, it’s a game of catch-up. The big difference in cost between Snowflake and Redshift is the fact that Snowflake was built to decouple computing and storage costs. The true cost-savings come from the tighter infrastructure Snowflake can help you build. Of course, the price of data warehouses depends on a ton of factors, but overall ( according to our friends at Fivetran) Redshift and Snowflake will cost about the same. Snowflake Is Cheaper, but Not for the Reason You Might Think If you work in data, Snowflake just makes your life better. ”As you can guess, these quality-of-life improvements have made Snowflake their fair share of fan boys/girls, us included (can’t you tell?). One user on the r/bigdata subreddit described it like this when they first switched to Snowflake, “I was skeptical but actually does seem to make performance management easier and allows me more time to actually work with the data. We could go on and on here about specific features, but at its core, Snowflake takes care of the crap for you so you can actually do your job. It’s flat-out riskier and more stressful. And with Redshift, you need to work with production data (😬) if you want to copy databases within your data structure. Redshift (and other traditional data warehouses) require that you go through the messy, insecure, and stressful process of managing multiple duplicate ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines. The alternative is the more traditional way of sharing data that Redshift represents. When you’re done, you just click “deprovisionize” and you’re good. Copying a database in a safe, secure way with Snowflake takes only one click, and it’s all self-contained.

On a technical level, this simplicity is made possible by Snowflake’s unique ability to copy databases within your own data structure and then grant instant read access to those databases ( dive deeper into the documentation here if you want). It’s about as simple to share data with Snowflake as it is to share a Google Doc. One big way Snowflake makes your life easer as a data person is that it make sharing data super simple. Even if all other aspects, such as pricing or concurrency, were equal (and they aren’t), this alone should tip the scale for most. Snowflake has invested in quality-of-life features - like how easy it is to share data and the user experience - from the ground-up, while Redshift is still trying to catch up. Put simply, right now, Snowflake is better on almost all fronts and for most businesses than Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift is a huge legacy data warehousing product that, while powerful, doesn’t address these needs. Snowflake is a modern data-warehousing solution that’s built with the needs of today’s data teams in mind. In that line of thinking, you can think of Snowflake as Redshiftshift. Rumor has it that Redshift was named for its desire to shift people away from data warehousing offered by Oracle (whose brand used to be “red” ).

Redshift pricing