Concord was a proud sponsor of Snowflake Summit, a four-day conference where thousands of Snowflake’s partners, customers, and industry peers gathered in Las Vegas to network, collaborate, and learn about Snowflake and the emerging trends in data and analytics.
The week was filled with keynotes and breakout sessions that covered everything from optimizing Snowflake to modernizing data architectures to accelerating analytics. Many exciting products were announced during the event.
If you were unable to attend, our experts compiled a list of the key innovations shared at Summit, including flexible programmability, advancements with generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), and more!
One of the biggest product announcements at Snowflake Summit was the launch of Snowpark Container Services, a new feature within Snowflake Data Cloud’s Native App Framework.
Containers are self-contained software packages that allow teams to build, test, and run their applications in different environments. Most containers include application code, external software, and an operating system to execute that code. With Snowpark Container Services, developers can build in any programming language and run more workloads within Snowflake’s secure and governed platform.
“Snowpark Container Services expands Snowflakes compute infrastructure dramatically. It allows you to run a variety of different workloads actively on Snowflake. The workloads that are enabled through Snowpark Container Services include full-stack applications, robust model training, and secure hosting of LLMs and generative AI,” said Torsten Grabs, Senior Director of Product Management at Snowflake.
Snowpark Container Services simplifies complex operations by giving users the ability to execute on the data without the need for user-defined functions. The service also expands the scope of workloads and third-party tools that can be brought to customer data.
The integration of container services within Snowflake streamlines workflow and provides teams with flexibility, which unlocks new possibilities and use cases in data processing.
Snowflake aims to remove silos and mobilize your data. AI was a primary topic discussed at Summit as it’s quickly evolving and accelerating Snowflake’s company vision.
During the conference, Snowflake executives shared that the company has partnered with NVIDIA, a leading hardware provider for AI and machine learning (ML) technologies, to create customized generative AI applications within the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Snowflake will leverage NVIDIA’s NeMo platform to harness data in Snowflake accounts and develop LLMs for generative AI services like chatbots, summarization, and intelligent search.
One of the key concerns around Generative AI and LLM is privacy, especially when it involves highly sensitive data. The partnership with NVIDIA expands capabilities and accounts for the need for secure data. Torsten highlighted that users don’t need to move governed data outside of Snowflake in order to use it in AI models and apps, which greatly reduces security risk.
“A lot of the sensitivities that customers have today interacting with AI, particularly from the enterprise, is around how sensitive the data is. Where am I sending my data to? If it's hosted as an LLM somewhere in the cloud, can I trust it? How much want do I want to rely on that? Wouldn't it be easier for me if I ran that LLM capability inside my security perimeter in Snowflake? And now, with the announcements to date, that has become possible, right? We've shown how you can do that with NVDIA,” Torsten said.
During the keynote, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman reiterated that before AI comes data strategy. By creating custom models using data on Snowflake Data Cloud, companies will be able to leverage generative AI to advance their operations with applications that understand their business and the domains in which they operate.
Snowflake has turned into a platform with many capabilities. Companies can use the Snowflake platform for everything from basic use cases to complex needs arising from expansion and collaboration, as well. No matter where you are in your journey with Snowflake, Concord experts are here to help.
As a Select tier partner, we work with Snowflake to accelerate the digital transformation of our joint customers. If you’re looking to adopt and optimize the Data Cloud to drive real transformative change within your data organization, connect with us below.
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