The Future is Here: Snowflake BUILD ‘22

Snowflake BUILD 2022 took the well-known scaffolding of the Data Cloud Dev Summit and reshaped the framework, making room for data scientists, architects, entrepreneurs, data engineers, and others dedicated to learning data techniques related to transformation, building, integration and with four (4) hands-on labs, experimentation! This blog is a brief, high-level overview of this year’s Summit. If you wish to revisit a session or try one of the labs you may have missed, watch the recordings on demand.

BUILD ‘22 kicked off with a conversation between Benoit Dageville, Co-Founder of Snowflake and President of Product, and Polita Paulus, a Principle Engineer at Snowflake. While this conversation covered a little bit of Snowflake’s history and recent acquisitions, the main thread throughout this informal chat session was applications. Dageville noted that modern applications should be built as a data application, and as such, it is Snowflake’s mission to make the Data Cloud the best place to build, run, distribute, and monetize data apps.

Streamlit. With its ability to bring data analysis and ML together and communicate results via a user-friendly app created with a few lines of Python, all within Snowflake, Streamlit was a major feature throughout BUILD ‘22.

Attendees had many options to learn and engage with Streamlit including a hands-on lab, where participants built a data application utilizing data from Snowflake Marketplace. The lab walked users through processing data with Snowpark, developing a simple ML model, creating a Python UDF in Snowflake, and finally, visualizing the data using Streamlit.

Day 2 of BUILD ‘22 opened with Adrien Treuille, head of Streamlit at Snowflake, presenting “The Builders’ Data Cloud”. During this session, Attendees were given a peek at the forthcoming Streamlit-Snowflake integration. Treuille demonstrated how users will be able to build Streamlit apps in Snowsight and deploy them on Snowflake. He also shared some details regarding in-progress development for Streamlit and Snowflake, both together and as an open source project.

“First-party integration of Streamlit in Snowflake lets you take all of that open source awesomeness and bring it to bear on your Snowflake data,” explained Treuille. “Even bigger is we are going to allow you to create these apps and share them in [Snowflake] Marketplace so that external customers can get access to Streamlit apps through our Native Apps Framework.”

BUILD ‘22 featured numerous opportunities for attendees to learn about and engage with the open source community. If you are not familiar with or have little exposure to open source projects or the open source community, watch the Open Source in the Data Cloud session. This session’s panel included Katrina Riehl, Head of the Streamlit Data Team at Snowflake and President of the Board of Directors at NumFOCUS; Peter Wang, CEO and Co-Founder of Anaconda; Ryan Blue, CEO and Co-Founder of Tabular and Co-Founder of Apache Iceberg; and Willem Pienaar, Engineering Manager at Tecton and Creator of Feast.

Each panelist brought a unique perspective to the benefits of open source work and espoused the philosophy that releasing projects to the open source community reduces risk and increases trust for companies interested in implementing the open source projects. Check out these quotes which encapsulate the current and ongoing benefits of open source projects.

“We reduced a lot of the risk with ML tooling by open sourcing the feature store and ultimately moving it into the Linux Foundation in order to make it neutral, give companies confidence that they could adopt this, use it, and if my team or any other team goes away, they can continue to contribute and fork it or do whatever they want with it.”
– William Pinear

“The mindshare that comes from having different perspectives on a project in order to improve it is another benefit of involving the open source community.”
– Katrina Riehl

“A lot of open source seems to start when practitioners talk to each other and realize they’re all trying to solve the same problem — then put their heads together to tackle it…When everyone has the ability to build those kinds of applications, to ask those questions, to put their views on data in a place to be shared by other people, that really unlocks so much productivity inside businesses.”
– Peter Wang

Anyone interested in further investigating open source work can check out anaconda.com, iceberg.apache.org, feast.dev, and streamlit.io for project information. If you are up for a challenge Snowflake is working with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to take the Snowflake Startup Challenge to the next level!

If you are interested in previous Snowflake events, check out our recap from Snowflake 2022 Snow Day and the Snowflake Summit 2022. As a trusted Snowflake partner, we can help you on your Snowflake journey. Contact us today, at [email protected] to learn more about how we can accelerate time to market, deliver a better customer experience, and improve operational efficiency by leveraging the speed, scale, and performance of Snowflake’s platform.