Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024: Highlights and Key Takeaways

The 2024 Snowflake Summit was heavily focused on AI, dubbing its platform the “AI Data Cloud." While this was a central theme, the Snowflake Summit was a hub to learn all things Snowflake and its ecosystem. Snowflake has evolved to be more than just a cloud data warehousing platform. Snowflake now supports various workloads within its data cloud, including transactional data systems, native application development, machine learning, and security.

There was something to learn for everyone at Snowflake Summit, regardless of their persona. Technical teams could learn about new features coming to the platform or attend hands-on workshops to sharpen their skills. Business teams could learn from their peers about the challenges Snowflake is solving for their organizations and how to successfully drive adoption across the enterprise. As with most conferences, there were endless opportunities to connect and network with other Snowflake users and those curious about joining the platform. These conversations alone make attending the conference worth it for many.

The SME Team had the pleasure of attending this year’s Snowflake Summit and has put together some key takeaways they felt were the highlights of the event.

Product Updates

The AI Data Cloud:

It was no surprise that the main theme of Snowflake Summit this year was AI. Between the tech market direction and Snowflake’s recent product releases and acquisitions, we all knew that Snowflake was going to double down on its work in the generative and enterprise AI space.

During the opening keynote, Snowflake CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, video calls NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, to discuss the strategic partnership between the two companies and the advancements and collaboration of NVIDIA AI Enterprise into Snowflake’s Cortex AI. It truly set the tone for the rest of the Summit. Speaking of Cortex, Snowflake announced a handful of public and private preview components, specifically Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, to further enable enterprises to make use of generative AI.

Cortex Analyst allows business users to use natural language to interact with their structured data and quickly create self-service answers.

Cortex Search allows for the quick and secure retrieval of information by asking questions within a given set of enterprise documents with semantic and keyword hybrid search.

In addition to the Cortex components, Snowflake discussed the upcoming general availability of Document AI, a serverless large language model (LLM) for extracting structured data from unstructured documents like PDFs. These announcements demonstrate Snowflake’s commitment to democratizing generative and enterprise AI to the masses.

Native Applications: 

Last year, Snowflake Summit announced Snowpark Container Services (SPCS), a fully managed container service for applications within the Snowflake ecosystem. With a handful of launch partners, developers were excited to be able to deploy applications where their data resided in Snowflake. While remaining in preview for almost a year, Snowflake announced at this data cloud summit the general availability of SPCS. Apps built within the data cloud can utilize the Native App Framework for rapid development and Streamlit for rich visualization.

Furthermore, Snowflake Native Apps can now be published on the Snowflake Marketplace, allowing for faster distribution of applications. From a producer perspective, the Snowflake Marketplace for both applications and data has quickly become a prime way for organizations to generate new revenue streams. On the consumer side, Snowflake customers can access hundreds of data and app providers, try and buy products faster, and access certain application datasets with zero-ETL.

Polaris:

Apache Iceberg has become a household name in the data lake community as one of the prominent table formats for open data. Apache Iceberg can transform data on the lake into a SQL-ready lakehouse solution with features such as multi-engine support, schema evolution, and transactional consistency. Despite this, there are still some challenges associated with running a lakehouse on just open file and table formats.

Snowflake announced the release of its Polaris Catalog, an open source data catalog that allows for cross-engine read and write interoperability and centralized access. This means that data tables can be modified concurrently while still producing accurate results by querying. Essentially, all read and write operations on Apache Iceberg tables are routed through a catalog.

The Polaris catalog supports all three major clouds and multiple engines, including Snowflake, Spark, Trino, Dremio, Confluent, and more. The great thing about the Polaris Catalog is that you don’t have to be a Snowflake customer to take advantage of it, making it a great announcement for the Iceberg Community as a whole.

Partner Ecosystem

As with every Summit, the expo hall floor was filled with ecosystem partners showcasing their integrations and enhancements for the Snowflake platform. These vendors covered the entire spectrum of data intelligence: data integration, business intelligence, security and governance, ML and AI, and more. Many of SME Solutions Group's partners were in attendance, such as Matillion, data.world, Sigma, and DataOps.live, many of whom took home Snowflake ‘Partner of the Year’ awards this year. The innovations that many of these partners announced and/or demonstrated at their booths revolved around, you guessed it, AI.

With Snowflake's Cortex AI and other functionality becoming available to the masses, these partners are making it easier for organizations to leverage these components of the platform and increase the speed of deployment, development, adoption, and overall ROI. The democratization of AI via partners adds tremendous value to both the customer investments in the Snowflake platform and their partner integrations.

This year paved a pretty clear path that Snowflake is heavily investing in growing the world of generative AI and LLMs. In conclusion, the 2024 Snowflake Data Cloud Summit was a comprehensive event that highlighted Snowflake's strong emphasis on AI and its expanding ecosystem. It was a fantastic year and an even better event that allowed everyone to connect and understand the technologies on a deeper level.