Snowflake Openflow: Unleash Your Data’s True Velocity with Snowflake

The volume and velocity of data continue to accelerate, flowing in from countless sources and in every imaginable format. While the Snowflake AI Data Cloud provides a powerful foundation for housing and leveraging this data, the critical first step – getting the data in and ready for analysis – has traditionally presented a complex challenge. Building robust, scalable, and flexible data integration pipelines often requires juggling disparate tools, managing complex infrastructure, and wrestling with diverse data types.

But what if data integration could be as seamless, scalable, and secure as Snowflake itself? What if you could move data bidirectionally, in real-time or batch, regardless of whether the data is structured, semi-structured, or unstructured? The answer arrived on June 3rd at the San Francisco Snowflake Summit conference with the unveiling of Snowflake Openflow.

What is Snowflake Openflow? 

Openflow is not just a new tool. Openflow is an open, extensible, and secure data integration platform natively built within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Leveraging the proven foundation of the highly popular open-source Apache NiFi framework, originally designed to handle all types of data at a massive scale for some of the world’s most secure organisations, OpenFlow supercharges its capabilities as a pure cloud-native solution. Snowflake contributes to the open-source community, bringing future improvements back to the NiFi framework.  

By integrating deeply with Snowflake, Openflow allows you to leverage the platform’s inherent “easy to use” approach, robust security model, and simplified deployment. Implementation and management of sophisticated data pipelines are now easier than ever before. Get ready to transform your data integration from a bottleneck into a dynamic, powerful current fueling your entire data strategy.  

For a deeper dive into the technical architecture and functionalities, read our comprehensive technical overview of Snowflake OpenFlow.

Connect Anything, Anywhere: Universal Data Access

A universal data service for any source to any destination is critical in a diverse data landscape. Openflow is designed for exactly this. It provides unparalleled flexibility to integrate with virtually any system.  

Openflow comes equipped with a rapidly expanding library of connectors. It has more than 350 available at launch or very soon in the roadmap. This includes curated flows for ingesting data from a vast array of sources:  

• Databases: Connect easily to traditional databases like MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and any JDBC data source. Benefit from curated flows and zero-impact Change Data Capture (CDC) for supported sources. 
  
• Popular SaaS Platforms: Seamlessly integrate data from essential business applications. Examples are Microsoft Dataverse, Google Ads, Zendesk, Meta, Workday, Asana, Salesforce, and Jira. 
  
• Streaming Services: Achieve high-throughput (up to 5GB/s) and low-latency continuous ingestion from Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Amazon SQS, and ActiveMQ. 
  
• Unstructured Data Repositories: Critically, Openflow excels where many traditional ETL tools fall short. Why? It offers curated flows to ingest content from unstructured data sources like Microsoft Sharepoint, Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, and Dropbox. Instantly make this unstructured content “Ready for Chat” for your AI assistants. 
  
• General Storage Services: Retrieve structured and semi-structured file formats from various services. Examples are Amazon S3, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Blob Storage, SFTP, Milvus, and Pinecone.  

This extensive connectivity ensures that no matter where your data resides, Openflow can bring it into the Snowflake Data Cloud efficiently and securely. It honours user permissions configured in source systems and eliminates the need for manual file transfers or bespoke integrations.

Transform and Process with Native Power

Getting data into Snowflake is the first step; transforming it is where its true value is unlocked. Openflow provides powerful processing capabilities directly within the Snowflake environment. It allows you to refine, enrich, and prepare data for analytics and AI.

Leveraging the core strengths of Apache NiFi, Openflow brings unparalleled capabilities for handling arbitrarily large unstructured data. It includes “Ready to Use” processors for working with unstructured content in your custom flows. Easily process unstructured content, extend flows for custom processing (e.g., DocumentAI), and mix & match processors across multiple unstructured data sources.  

For both structured and unstructured data, Openflow enables:

• In-flight transformation: Reduce latency and cost by transforming data as it flows through the pipeline, particularly beneficial for streaming data. 
  
• Simplified pipeline management: Implement and manage sophisticated data pipelines with greater ease. 
  
• Built-in support: Manage secrets and isolated storage for ingested content securely. 
  
• Automatic upgrades: Benefit from automatic upgrades to the latest version of processors.  

This native transformation capability means you can build and execute complex data pipelines directly within Snowflake, leveraging its powerful compute and eliminating the need for separate processing engines or unnecessary data movement.

Built for Scale, Performance, and Observability

Openflow inherits and supercharges the characteristics that make both Snowflake and Apache NiFi leaders in their fields. Think of massive scale, high performance, and deep observability.

• Massive Scale & Performance: Proven at massive scale with thousands of enterprise users, NiFi’s foundation is inherently scalable. Openflow, built on Snowflake, leverages this foundation. It is designed for high throughput (up to 5GB/s for streaming) and low latency. It’s built for scale and performance, capable of high-speed ingest for all your data into Snowflake, including Kafka into Polaris/Iceberg at multi GB/sec rates. 
  
• Cloud-Native & Flexible Deployment: Designed as a pure cloud-native solution, Openflow offers flexible deployment options. It supports hybrid deployments with Snowflake-hosted and BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) options. It even has eventual support for On-Prem environments on the roadmap. Containerisation is delivered natively as a managed service and can run in customers’ own VPCs or on Snowflake Container Services (SPCS).  

• Observability & Security: Observability and security were foundational principles for NiFi. Openflow maintains this, ensuring every step of every pipeline is observable out-of-the-box. Combined with Snowflake’s managed security and governance, Openflow provides a secure and transparent platform for your data pipelines.  

This combination of scalability, performance, and built-in observability ensures your data pipelines are not only efficient but also reliable and easy to monitor. This give you complete visibility into your data flows.

Powering Modern AI Systems

The ability to seamlessly integrate all data types, especially unstructured data, is crucial for the age of Artificial Intelligence. Openflow is extended for the needs of modern AI systems, specifically powered to work with modern AI platforms in general and with Snowflake Cortex in particular.  

Openflow allows for the unification of structured and unstructured data within a single solution, leveraging continuous and real-time scheduling to access unstructured formats from containers like Sharepoint or Google Drive and leveraging that information in your current structured data pipelines. This enables key use cases like continuous ingest for multimodal data for AI, providing near real-time unstructured data ingestion so you can immediately chat with data coming from sources like Sharepoint and Google Drive. This instant readiness of unstructured content for AI assistants is a game-changer.  

For a deeper dive into how OpenFlow and Snowflake are revolutionising AI-ready data platforms, explore our article on ‘Snowflake & OpenFlow: AI Agentic-Ready Data Platforms‘.

The Complete Data Pipeline within a Unified Platform

With Openflow, Snowflake now offers a truly unified data platform. Combining Snowflake’s classic “ease of use,” managed security, and governance, Openflow allows you to manage your entire data lifecycle, from high-speed ingest for all your data types into Snowflake, to integrating Snowflake with Hybrid Data Estates (Cloud and On-Prem), all the way up through the medallion layers of your data warehouse.  

Key Use Cases for Snowflake Openflow:

Openflow is the complete data pipeline, eliminating the need to manage complex, disparate tools and infrastructure for data movement and transformation. It’s built for exactly-once delivery guarantees and provides in-flight transformation for lower latency and cost.  

Experience the Seamless Flow with Openflow

The launch of Snowflake Openflow is more than just a product announcement; it’s a paradigm shift in how data integration can and should be done in the age of the Data Cloud and AI. By bringing powerful, flexible, and scalable integration natively into Snowflake, we’re empowering organisations to unlock the full potential of their data faster, easier, and more securely than ever before.

Stop fighting the data current. It’s time to experience the effortless flow.

For more details on the partnership behind OpenFlow, read our news announcement about Devoteam’s collaboration with Snowflake.

Understanding powerful real-time data integration methods like Change Data Capture is essential to truly unleashing your data’s velocity.