Its more like 'Here at BigCo, we do x because it scales. We have learned it from various incidents that we won't tell you about, but trust us we have to do it this way."
I've worked at BigCo. It's resume padding with the fear of looking like an idiot for not knowing about the new tech.
We were going to go all in on Snowflake with everyone on the team being for it. I sat down, read the original whitepaper, wrote a simulation of what the costs would look like with the current read/write statistics and tested a small batch of data on it to double check.
Turns out we would have paid between x500 to x10,000 what we were currently paying for using Postgres. I moved on three months ago, and last I heard they were trying to use Snowflake again.
I'm starting to wonder if there is market to do "technology laundering", use things like PostgreSQL, SQLite, standard Unix tools, put it under some cloud marketing and charge a x10 premium.
Or perhaps not only there is market, but that's more or less what everyone is already doing.
If you can set it up so it solves my problems, yes.
I could manage my own server and fine tune everything, or I can throw it on snowflake. Snowflake means I've spent almost no time managing anything and it was costing less than an aws box running postgres but absolutely blew it out of the water performance wise. Depends on your workload but it's been perfect for one of my use cases. If they were just using postgres under the hood and I got the same en experience - fine.
Big things are time sharing resources and management/updates/etc. Can you charge me 10x the underlying cost but let me pay for two minutes on a wildly powerful machine? Great, that's a net win for me.
I know nothing about Snowflake so can not really comment on particular case. However the generic statement that I hear often goes something like this: it is so much trouble to manage your own infrastructure and on cloud everything is done for you. Well I saw with my own eyes that having ones's infrastructure deployed on Azure keeps them quite busy anyways.
After a year of AWS I can tell you it's as much a PITA or more to manage all the components as it would have been to manage a few Spring Boot and MySQL Droplets.
Not really OLTP, analytical workloads but can't go into much detail I'm afraid. Infrequent, unpredictable and benefitting from rapid scaling (0 to lots of power & ram for short periods) is where cloud type things (can) really shine.
