The Snowflake Summit 2022 was the first conference I’d attended since 2019. My expectations were high and I was excited! As you know, I joined Ascend.io just this year, so the conference was going to be the first chance to meet some of my teammates in person. Having been a Snowflake customer a couple of times in the past, I was also looking forward to reconnecting with colleagues and friends who work with Snowflake on a daily basis.
Meeting people in person for the first time after getting to know them on zoom is a great way to team build. We got to chuckle over how tall someone is in real life or laugh at hilarious stories that you can’t tell when you’re on a group video call. I joined Ascend.io to work with amazing humans. I left the conference knowing that I found the right people.
Having had literally hundreds of conversations, my voice was not in great shape by the end of the Summit. I can’t wait to do it again!
For this post, I thought I’d share a couple of themes that kept coming up during conversations with a range of people from data engineers to data analysts to executives and business people. I had the same struggles as a Snowflake customer and Leader of Data. How do I move data to my new environment given the ‘gravity’ of data? How should I think differently about automated cloud native data vs. the status-quo I am about to leave behind?
The work and sometimes toil required to load data into Snowflake is real. There is no magic. Yes, Snowflake has Snowpipe and there are a plethora of tools that can get data from a ‘stage’ into some ‘raw’ Snowflake landing zone. Most organizations have extremely unique and much more complex problems that immediately raise the data management complexity bar. I heard about on-premise data moving to the cloud, multiple data feeds, multiple clouds, SaaS integrations (both directions!), one-off data formats, and loading data from 30+ year old technology. I even had no less than 3 conversations about how to move data out of an AS/400 environment.
A majority of my conversations were with people just starting their cloud journey with modern data tools and cloud data warehousing. Snowflake is their platform of choice (I chose it twice!) for very good reasons. Some had existing schemas and data in older technologies and wanted an upgrade for scale or performance. Some wanted to leverage AI/ML tools but needed a data environment that could support the performance requirements. Still others were struggling to understand how the cloud changes their paradigms and mindset of how to manage data in the cloud. Tipping your prior-to-cloud design (and thinking) from vertical to horizontal scaling is not an easy exercise. Even more deeply, are you thinking about how your organization might need to change to support data in the cloud?
Ascend.io is a Snowflake partner because we fully understand and recognize these data automation challenges. Our mission is to provide an end-to-end self-managed data automation platform that simplifies your world. We provide a fully abstracted environment for you to focus on your data and leave the really hard cloud work to us. We pull your valuable transformation code up to an approachable interface that all your data people can use. Leave the hard work of elasticity, connectivity, security, monitoring, logging, and the rest to the end-to-end self-managed Ascend.io data automation platform. Sign up for a 20 minute demo.
I hope to see you before next year’s Summit. If not, see you next year!
