Snowflake Native App·2023–2024
CloudPAHL
Making invisible cloud spend legible enough to act on.
My role
One of three core developers
Outcome
Shipped on the Snowflake Marketplace; gives administrators a holistic view of utilization, forecasted spend, and RBAC risk in one place.
01
The problem
- Organizations moving to Snowflake gained enormous analytical power but lost visibility into what it cost them. Spend was real and growing; the reasons were buried across users, warehouses, and queries.
- The people accountable for the bill — IT and BI directors, Snowflake administrators — didn't have a single place to answer basic questions: Is this scaling the way we expected? Who and what is driving cost? Where is the risk?
- The ambiguity wasn't technical so much as organizational: everyone agreed spend needed managing, but no one had a shared, trustworthy picture to decide against.
02
The approach
- We built CloudPAHL as a Snowflake Native App so the analysis runs inside the customer's own account — their data never leaves their security boundary.
- I helped design and build the analytical surfaces that mattered to decision-makers: a platform overview of utilized vs. underutilized services, a health check attributing cost and credit trends, an audit view of user behavior and training gaps, and RBAC lineage visualization for governance.
- The guiding principle was legibility over dashboards-for-their-own-sake: every view had to map to a decision a director could actually make — forecast the year, retrain a team, tighten a permission, resize a warehouse.
03
The outcome
- CloudPAHL is available on the Snowflake Marketplace and used by administrators and BI leaders to manage cost, forecast spend, and mitigate governance risk.
- It packages hard-won diagnostic patterns into a repeatable product — the same class of analysis that, delivered as engagements, reduced Snowflake credit spend by roughly 80% across multiple clients.
- It reframes cost management from a periodic fire drill into an ongoing, self-serve practice.
Technologies
Snowflake Native AppsSnowflakeSQLStreamlitPythonRBAC / GovernanceCost Modeling