Architecture: Snowflake

A data engineer kicks off a heavy quarterly report at 9 a.m. It scans two years of order history and takes four minutes to run. At the same moment, three hundred analysts open their morning dashboards, a nightly load job is still flushing yesterday's events into the warehouse, and a data scientist is training a churn model against the same tables. On a traditional warehouse, all of these workloads fight over the same fixed pool of CPU and di… Read More

Architecture: Amazon Aurora

You have a production MySQL database on RDS. It works fine at low traffic. Then your load doubles, and you start running into the ceiling: replication lag, failover times measured in minutes, and the uncomfortable knowledge that your data lives on a single EBS volume. You can throw more compute at it, but the storage layer stays the same. The database is the bottleneck, and there is no obvious way out short of a full re-architecture. Amazon Auror… Read More