DoubleCloud vs. Snowflake: David and Goliath of data engineering
DoubleCloud and Snowflake are pretty different, each with its own strengths. Snowflake is huge and powerful, whereas DoubleCloud is nimble: what it lacks in scope, it makes up for in speed and performance.
The basics
Snowflake
Snowflake made a name for itself by being the first cloud company to separate storage and compute. At the time, in 2014, it was a revolutionary feature that allowed you to avoid paying for compute if all you needed was to store a lot of data, and vice versa.
Honestly, it remains a great feature to this day, along with many other offerings from Snowflake. It can be a data lake or a data warehouse; it has a built-in data governance solution, its own marketplace with hundreds of apps, and, of course, AI. Before Snowflake, the concept of the data warehouse itself was different, and we respect Snowflake for changing the game and making it much more playable.
DoubleCloud
DoubleCloud is quite a bit younger than Snowflake. We focus on a few select services andgs and strive to make each of them top-of-the-line.
DoubleCloud excels at building data infrastructure for real-time analytics. We rely on the finest open-source technologies and enhance them by adding helpful tools and features built by our expert engineers. We offer data integration, orchestration, storage, analytics, and visualization solutions and are proud to say that DoubleCloud’s tech is among the fastest and most cost-efficient out there. We’re a small company, so our engineers and managers often work directly with clients. We’re not shy of hands-on experience and hopefully will keep it that way.
The particulars
Out of all the typical scenarios of working with data, a couple stand out when you put Snowflake and DoubleCloud head-to-head, especially if you consider performance and cost-efficiency gains.
Real-time / customer-facing analytics
DoubleCloud is faster and cheaper than Snowflake for real-time analytics, notably due to much more affordable scaling when you need one. It’s also pretty straightforward to get up and running.
To make real-time analytics work in Snowflake, you have to create a complex setup that will not necessarily yield the results you need because of scheduled batching or other overheads that inevitably come with the complexity of heavier products. DoubleCloud’s combo of Kafka and ClickHouse makes our solution shine in terms of simplicity and speed.
For anything real-time, speed is vital and can make all the difference if you do information security or other sensitive operations. If it’s cheap, even better. Our client Spectrio transitioned from Snowflake to DoubleCloud, cutting their total infrastructure cost by up to 40% while getting performance benefits, too.
Observability
ClickHouse database is ideal for storing logs and metrics data. Combined with DoubleCloud’s S3 hybrid storage, Kafka, and other open-source tech, it’s a top choice for building observability pipelines. You can use Grafana or DataDog to access logs, a tool like Vector to collect them and send them to a logbroker, and then store data in ClickHouse. These are all open-source tools, so there’s no vendor lock-in and no surprises.
Our client, Honeybadger, who provides developers with monitoring tools, got a 30x speedup in returning search results after implementing DoubleCloud’s Managed Service for ClickHouse, praising the performance gains and reasonable pricing.
DoubleCloud in action
The verdict
Snowflake is great; it’s hands down one of the most complete cloud services out there. However, it’s been an enterprise-focused data platform for some time now. Sometimes, you just can’t afford Snowflake, and whether you’re an enterprise or not, you might not even need it. Snowflake’s versatility may be overkill for what you want to do with your data. There are simpler scenarios and more streamlined use cases that can be covered by other providers, which might be just a tad better for you. DoubleCloud offers fewer solutions, but they are more compact, flexible, and cost-effective, accompanied by fluid support and zero vendor lock-in. Give it a try.
5 key areas where ClickHouse outshines Snowflake
Learn about the superior query performance, scalability, strong community support, and other standout features of ClickHouse compared to Snowflake in an article by our Developer Advocate, Igor Mosyagin.
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