In 2012, Benoit, Thierry, and Marcin, our founders, had an insight. They realized the public cloud could enable a new architecture for data warehousing. This insight became the founding vision of Snowflake and it remains the foundation of everything we continue to deliver to our customers today.
Since our inception, Snowflake has been built on AWS. The innovation we’ve delivered and our success to date is thanks to our partnership with AWS. Snowflake would not be possible without the innovation and customer-centric delivery of the world-class AWS service. Customer demand for Snowflake on AWS continues to grow rapidly around the world. We now offer Snowflake in five AWS regions, with more regions coming online in the months and years ahead.
The public cloud has also matured significantly in the six years since Snowflake was founded. AWS has also grown enormously with a huge selection of infrastructure and platform services available for modern cloud development. Other IaaS providers have also entered the market and matured. Customers around the world now have several viable IaaS cloud providers to choose from.
At Snowflake, we put our customers first. Over the past 18 months, we have heard from a growing set of existing and potential Snowflake customers who would like Snowflake on Azure. Many of these customers have been working with Microsoft for decades and view Azure as their preferred cloud infrastructure provider. In other cases, customers are pursuing a multi-vendor cloud strategy across AWS and Azure. Whatever the reason, Snowflake is focused on delivering what customers want.
So today, we are pleased to announce Snowflake availability for preview on Microsoft Azure. We are initially offering Snowflake in the Azure East-US-2 region, with more Azure regions coming in the months ahead.
Our goal is to fully support Snowflake on both AWS and Azure, while taking advantage of the unique capabilities that each platform can provide our customers. While in preview, we will complete the few remaining features that are currently unavailable on Azure. Although this is a preview, our early Azure customers are already running production workloads on Azure and are reporting very positive experiences.
Snowflake is closely engaged with the Microsoft team to deliver an outstanding sales and service experience for our customers on Azure. We have been working with Microsoft and Azure for over a year and it has been fun to re-engage with the Microsoft team. It’s clear Microsoft has made great progress, developing and maturing Azure into an outstanding platform for enterprise development.
In our experience, customers choose their IaaS cloud provider before they select their cloud data warehouse. There are several cloud providers and many, many regions available. Our customers have been very clear that they want Snowflake available in the cloud and region of their choice. Snowflake is growing quickly and we’re listening to our customers by adding regions, and now a new cloud. We’ll continue to do this in the months and years ahead. You can expect an announcement of a second Azure region, in Europe, later this year.
For Snowflake, adding support for Azure is the beginning of our journey to serve customers across clouds. You can expect to see many interesting features added in the months ahead to further improve our support across AWS and Azure. And we will continue to listen to our customers, delivering what they want and where they want Snowflake.
Bob