Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse system that allows enterprises to store and analyze both structured and semi-structured data. It creates separate virtual warehouses for different workloads so they do not compete for computing resources and can easily scale up or down. Snowflake has grown exponentially since being founded in 2012, reaching a $3.5 billion valuation in October 2018. It sells data warehousing services using a pay-as-you-use business model.