Slash Your Snowflake Spend: The Power of Account Separation
Reduce your Snowflake spend by distributing workloads across multiple accounts with lower-priced editions.
Switching to Snowflake from a traditional data warehouse feels like a breath of fresh air. Gone are the days of "DBA hell" and hours-long cluster resizing. Snowflake's separation of storage and compute lets you keep data in place and spin up warehouses on demand, with the hardware tailored to each workload.
But this convenience comes at a price – and it can add up fast. Snowflake bills in credits, with rates varying by edition: Standard ($2/credit), Enterprise ($3/credit), and Business Critical ($4/credit). That gap widens quickly when you're burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly. Some queries on larger warehouses can cost hundreds of dollars each. In fact, the smallest warehouse running for an hour will use up a full credit.
While Snowflake offers cost optimization guidance, the complexity leaves room for creative solutions. We've seen some customers employ a clever approach: splitting their Snowflake footprint across multiple edition-specific accounts.
Here's the idea: Use an Enterprise account for transformation workloads (read/write operations) but shift reporting (mostly read-only) to a Standard account. Reporting often has less time-sensitive requirements and the data it uses and generates is often isolated to the reporting environment. This way, you're not overpaying for features you don't need while still getting solid performance where it counts.
Implementing the Multi-Account Approach
Setting up a multi-account structure in Snowflake requires a bit of planning and careful execution but is fairly straightforward. Here’s a break down of the steps involved:
Create a new Snowflake account (Low effort): Sign up for a new Snowflake account with the desired edition (e.g., Standard for reporting workloads) and ensure the new account is in the same region as your existing account to facilitate data sharing.
Design your multi-account architecture (Medium effort): Map out which workloads and data will reside in each account and define their boundaries. Understand what functionality is required in each account by comparing Snowflake editions.
Configure accounts, roles, and permissions in the new setup (High effort): Mirror essential roles and permissions from the existing account but use this as an opportunity to limit access and improve security.
Enable cross-account data sharing (Medium effort): Set up a share in your source account containing the necessary databases, schemas, and tables and grant appropriate privileges on the shared data to roles in the target account.
Migrate workloads to the new account (Medium to High effort): Identify the workloads for migration and update the relevant configuration details in the ETL jobs, BI tools, and applications. Keep both running in parallel while you test the pipes.
Implement cross-account governance and monitoring (Medium effort): Set up centralized logging and monitoring across all accounts and make sure you have consistent tagging and naming conventions across accounts.
Monitor performance and impact (Ongoing, Medium effort): Review performance and cost of queries across the counts and migrate workloads as needed.
The multi-account strategy may appear complex, but it's a well-defined, low-risk approach with significant upside potential. Implementing this structure doesn't require an all-or-nothing commitment. Instead, you can—and should—run both setups in parallel, methodically testing the split-account approach against your existing architecture. This parallel operation provides a safety net: if any issues arise, you can seamlessly revert to your single-account setup without disrupting operations. However, when successful—and many organizations find it is—this approach delivers a double benefit. Not only can you achieve substantial cost savings, but you'll also enhance your overall security posture by enforcing clearer data boundaries and access controls. This allows you to capitalize on Snowflake's flexibility while optimizing your resource allocation and spend.