Prioritizing Snowflake Support in our FinOps Platform

During the last couple of weeks, I was asked by our investors, partners, and customers, “why did Finout decide to prioritize the Snowflake cost visibility integration?”

Now that our native Snowflake support has moved to open Beta, I think it’s a great opportunity to talk about our vision in general and the reason behind the decision to commit to a  Snowflake integration.

Finout's vision

Here at Finout, we envision a platform that provides our clients with a single source for analyzing the company costs –  cloud or not. This vision takes us far from today’s situation, which is borderline absurd. AWS costs are on one system, K8s on another, and Snowflake on a third. The end-user has no way to consolidate all their costs and figure out what’s really going on, and there are solid barriers between each platform. Our goal is clear, to build a holistic, FinOps-first platform with all the major cost centers inside it, a one-stop-shop.

Our vision does not stop at consolidating all the bills to a single platform. Our platform allows users to slice their costs into meaningful groups like features, business groups, and the holy grail “by customer” – all in minutes on a low touch platform. 

Consolidating AWS and Kubernetes Cost

When we started our journey with AWS, it was immediately apparent that K8s was a major pain point. In compliance with our vision, K8s costs now are visible in Finout as if K8s was part of the AWS cost: tags, special pricings, RIs, SPs, and all. 

With the market moving to more usage-based 3rd party solutions like Snowflake, we have adapted Finout’s platform to continue to build our vision of all the company costs under one roof, regardless of the function (cloud, data lake, and more to come). 

So Why Did We Prioritize Snowflake?

Snowflake works with all major cloud service providers: AWS, Azure, GCP, and Salesforce. It is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world – a solution used by more than 4500 companies globally.

More importantly, Snowflake’s cost-per-usage model is revolutionary in the cloud DB ecosystem, with more than 100 companies paying them $1M  and beyond. This is where Finout’s value comes in. For the first time, there is a single place to analyze your Snowflake costs easily that allows you to connect your Snowflake cost to your AWS and K8s billing. 

By examining the number of credits (compute and storage) used in your Snowflake account, we automatically calculate the discounts for usage and provide an analysis of the total cost. This  allows you to use your resources more effectively to maximize your business value.

What Can You Do With Finout's Snowflake Integration

 Finout’s integration reaches a granularity that allows you to analyze costs by “database name”, “query type”, “role name”, “warehouse_name” and, most importantly, by all the query tags applied.

Now just imagine the power of this use-case: 

Consider a business committed to a fully multi-tenant product built on top of AWS and Snowflake, where single tenants use both AWS resources and Snowflake resources; but there are no dedicated resources, and all resources are shared. With Finout’s unit-cost engine, you can attribute each tenant's cost regardless of the service they are using (AWS or Snowflake). This build is view agnostic –  breaking the barriers between both providers and letting the FinOps professional focus purely on the business functions they provide without the technical challenges.

We believe that, with the hyper-growth of cloud usage, our world has already changed. The first thing a modern company needs is cost observability over its usage-based pricing bills, or else it won’t be able to efficiently scale, optimize, or forecast. We aim to consolidate between providers and enable each user full cost observability. We are committed to breaking those barriers one by one. Snowflake is just another step in our path to this future.