Snowflake is designed through three main components: Cloud services: Snowflake uses ANSI SQL for cloud services empowering users to optimize their data. It eliminates the need for manual data warehouse management and tuning. Query processing (compute): The compute layer of Snowflake is made up of virtual cloud data warehouses that let you analyze data. Each Snowflake virtual warehouse is an independent cluster and they do not compete for computing resources nor affect the performance of each other — which means workload concurrency is never a problem. Database storage: The database storage layer holds all data loaded into Snowflake, including structured and semi structured data. Snowflake automatically manages all parts of the data storage process, including organization, structure, metadata, file size, compression, and statistics. See: Key Concepts & Architecture — Snowflake Documentation for more detail.