The data cloud is where data goes to live, waiting for someone to access it from anywhere at anytime! In all seriousness, the cloud is essentially a computing model that stores data on the internet, in this case through Snowflake, allowing it to become accessible from virtually anywhere in the world. With Snowflake, their data cloud architecture offers near-unlimited storage and compute in real time, therefore eliminating the need for businesses to purchase or manage their own data storage infrastructure.
The Data Cloud or the Snowflake Data Cloud is an overall Data Platform for analytical data workloads. Currently Snowflake is positioning their overall Data Cloud to handle 6 workloads:
- Data Warehousing
- Data Engineering
- Data Lake
- Data Science
- Data Applications
- Data Exchange
I wrote a more in depth article on the what I think the Snowflake Data Cloud is:
Snowflake now also has the overall Snowgrid which is the overall connected Data Mesh of all of Snowflake's accounts across all cloud providers and regions. Snowflake has achieved this through replication features across clouds.