Extend the Runway: A deep dive into Snowflake costs at Coalesce 2022

As companies brace themselves for the end of the longest bull run in history, the days of unrestrained cloud spending are coming to an end. In recent months, data teams are increasingly being asked to better understand, monitor and reduce their data warehouse spend. Outside of a few pre-built high level reports and a single dbt package, practitioners are not given much tooling or guidance on how to achieve this.

In this 30-minute talk, Jonathan Talmi and I share our first hand experience of cutting Snowflake spend. We talk through our end-to-end process, starting with adding granular observability & monitoring to the warehouse and using that to identify major cost drivers at the “data asset” level. We dive into the actual strategies and optimizations we deployed, and leave practitioners with a number of techniques and resources they can leverage immediately. We’ll also highlight the importance of having ongoing monitoring, controls and processes in place to ensure things don’t spiral out of control.

Presentation Recording

You can watch a full recording of the talk below, or download the slides from here.

Be sure to watch till the end in order to catch a surprise cameo by our CFO, Brick.