The Snowflake Savings Machine: Why Keebo Is Different From Other Optimization Products

Many companies promise to reduce Snowflake costs through optimization. Most deliver limited value.

Introduction

At Snowflake Summit, many vendors claimed cost savings through “automation” and “continuous optimization.”

These claims often lack substance. This article explains how Keebo differs and what capabilities matter.

Observe And Report

Many products fall into an “observe and report” category. They provide dashboards and reports on Snowflake usage and performance. Take a glance at any of their websites and you’ll find they all begin to sound alike. In this illustration I’ve assembled a bunch of screen captures of their key messages:

These tools provide insights but do not take action. Reports alone do not reduce costs. Teams must still implement and maintain changes.

Some tools support scheduled changes, such as resizing warehouses. However, these approaches are static and not adaptive.

• Can’t respond to problems. A recommendation implemented today might not work, or even cause harm, if there is a spike in the workload tomorrow. Observe and report products need human intervention and so cannot adjust automatically.
• Missing out on savings. Conversely, there may arise opportunities to save even more money when workloads change, but an observe and report product cannot adjust to this either.
• Doesn’t help overworked data teams. While pointing someone in the right direction is a nice thing to do, they still have to go do it. If the actions later need to be undone or changed, they have to do it again–but hopefully it isn’t at some strange hour when nobody is available. I’d rather have my valuable team of data engineers doing more valuable work, like building data pipelines and helping users with analytics.

Observe and Act

Effective optimization requires real-time action. Keebo automatically applies optimizations instead of only reporting issues.

Keebo automatically adjusts auto-suspend, warehouse size, and multi-cluster settings. It requires no data changes and deploys in minutes. \n\nIt monitors usage in real time and applies thousands of optimizations monthly. This screenshot shows the optimizations we are doing in real time of just the auto-suspend settings for one week of a customer’s warehouse:

Keebo accelerates queries by rewriting SQL and building optimized models. It improves performance in real time within defined budget and freshness constraints. This screenshot shows customer queries being dynamically re-written if it will help them run faster within the budget allocated, and bypassing those that don’t need rewriting. This is a big step beyond a performance insight to performance improvement:

For more on our technology, see our Warehouse Optimization evaluation guide and Query Acceleration overview and demo.

Aligned Goals

We are so serious about prioritizing action over reporting, we even price Warehouse Optimization based on your savings. We charge you a percentage of what we save you. This way you can be assured that our goals and your goals are aligned. Simply put, we have to get actual results for you or we won’t be able to keep you as a customer. This pricing model is unique to Keebo.

What About Slingshot?

One “observe and report” product in particular had a huge presence at the Snowflake Summit: Capital One Slingshot. They were everywhere you looked. Despite Slingshot’s prominence and household name sponsor, Keebo has actually been leading this space three years longer than Slingshot has been available. Perhaps you are thinking of using Slingshot for approval workflows and now wonder if it can handle optimization too. My concern would be that Slingshot cannot respond in real time, is not automatic, and thus doesn’t do enough to save you money and time. Keebo is the true Snowflake savings machine, optimizing warehouses and accelerating queries in real time without intervention needed from your data team. Slingshot simply cannot do that. You can take the burden off your data team with Keebo instead of merely alerting them to issues and providing suggestions.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Finally, here is a summary of how Keebo is different from the observe and report products like Slingshot: