Is your business fully harnessing the power that AI has to offer? Whether it be using predictive machine learning tools to acquire new customers or retain existing ones, or leveraging generative AI capabilities to increase the productivity of your workforce, use cases — and the potential for your data science strategy — are virtually endless.
For most organizations, deploying and integrating the right tech stack to support your AI journey is not an easy task. All the way from source data capture (be it first party or third party) to model deployment, there are a variety of technologies and teams involved. This is typically how the architecture is set up:
As you can see, there’s quite a bit going on here. A data engineering team will gather and transform data from disparate sources to a data warehouse or cloud. A data science team will pull that data to train an AI model. Finally, a devops team will deploy the model to a location where it can be consumed for multiple business use cases.
Many of these workloads can be consolidated into the Snowflake Data Cloud in a more cost-effective, efficient way
But first things first, let’s understand the basics.
Snowflake is a cloud based data platform that allows your organization to store immense amounts of data (be it structured, semi-structured or unstructured) in a secure and accessible location. By separating data storage from compute power, Snowflake allows you to quickly scale your workloads (either vertically or horizontally) in a matter of seconds with an easy-to-use UI. Furthermore, organizations only need to pay for the resources they use, making Snowflake an important partner in helping them achieve their growth plans.
Snowflake’s Snowpark takes consolidation and efficiency to the next level — and all within the Snowflake platform
The Snowpark API provides a library to query and transform data within the Snowflake platform with non-SQL code. Snowpark supports Python, Java, and Scala programming languages. Snowpark consists of client side libraries and server side runtimes that combine the flexibility of your desired programming language with the power of Snowflake platform. See the following Snowpark visual:
More specifically, how can Snowpark benefit your organization?
If we return to our previous AI example, we can see how multiple technologies come into play with the ultimate goal of provisioning your organization with a production-ready model. Snowpark can help you streamline this process by providing you the tools to transform the data, train the model, and deploy it — all within the Snowflake platform.
If data needs to be transformed beforehand, you can define views, tables, and user-defined functions (UDFs); create tasks and run the transformations at a desired frequency. When training the model, you can write the client code on your preferred IDE. However, all the heavy lifting occurs in Snowflake with its simple-to-scale platform to meet your workload demands. Lastly, you can deploy and query your model without having to leave the platform.
Eliminating ETL systems
Since you bring the work and AI to the data and not vice versa, there’s no need to transfer or integrate data with external systems. Furthermore, as data can be transformed within the same platform, there’s no need to involve external ETL systems. (I.e., data can be transformed where it resides, making the whole process more scalable and cost-effective.)
Snowpark: a unified API for all of your data workload needs
Snowpark streamlines your data workloads by offering a unified API for data transformation, analysis, model training, and common Snowflake administrative tasks, all using your preferred programming language. Naturally, Snowpark carries out each operation within the Snowflake platform, eliminating the necessity for external systems at any point in the process.
It helps to have a Snowflake partner that can guide you every step of the way
Here at Atrium, we have dedicated Snowflake consultants ready to help you maximize the value of your data, as well as your investment in the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Learn more about our Elite partner status and Snowflake services customized to fit your needs.
