Hex + Snowpark Container Services: Secure Analytics and ML for Enterprises

We are excited to announce that Snowflake customers can now deploy Hex inside their account with Snowpark Container Services. 

Snowpark Container Services allow developers to deploy container images in their Snowflake account, enabling applications such as Hex to run entirely within Snowflake's managed infrastructure. As a Snowflake customers, this guarantees data never leaves your account and gives you access to any reliable and scalable compute resources you need including GPUs for accelerated ML training

Note: This is currently in limited private preview. If you would like to join the private preview, please reach out!

Deploy Hex entirely in Snowflake

Enterprises can deploy Hex with Snowpark Container Services to analyze, model, and explore datasets using Python, SQL, and R without having to copy or move data outside of their secure and governed Snowflake account. 

Operating entirely within Snowflake's ecosystem means that Hex can directly benefit from the robust security and governance measures that Snowflake provides. It also means analytics can happen faster because compute happens where the data resides, which reduces the need for data movement and latency that could arise from transferring large datasets between different platforms.

GPU Compute

Snowpark Container Services come with configurable hardware options including NVIDIA AI GPUs. GPUs are exceptionally good at handling parallel operations, which can be extremely beneficial when processing large datasets. They can perform thousands of calculations simultaneously, which can dramatically decrease the time it takes to process data. Now you can select this as an option for any Hex cell supported by Snowpark.

Deeper Snowflake Integrations

In addition to launching our integration with Snowpark Container Services, we are also excited to announce additional Snowflake integration capabilities today.

R in Snowflake

Snowpark for Python enables Python users to operate on large datasets without requiring additional memory in Hex. This now works for R too! Hex uses ODBC pushdown to execute directly in Snowflake where the data is.

Snowpark ML API

From Hex you can now efficiently scale out feature engineering and simplify ML training execution in Snowflake using the most popular machine learning libraries (Scikit learn, xgboost, and lightgbm) with the Snowpark ML API. Using this new Snowpark library it is now faster and easier to push down processing to Snowflake to securely process large amounts of data as part of the ML model development workflow.

Combine SQL and Python in Snowpark

Analytics workflows require us to access, transform, and visualize data. Now you can combine SQL and Python in Snowpark, giving you full access to the power of Snowpark without any barriers regardless of how you need to process the data.

In summary

The first-class integration between Hex and Snowflake allows analysts and data scientists to work with more data and increasingly complex use cases faster and more securely. Push all your analytics workloads in Hex to Snowflake with our deepened integration capabilities, or deploy Hex inside your Snowflake account with Snowpark Container Services. We are proud to be named Snowflake’s 2023 Growth Partner of the Year and are excited to continue enabling secure, enterprise-grade analytics at scale.