One of the hottest announcements at Snowflake Summit 2023 was the launch of Hex on Snowpark Container Services. Snowpark Container Services is a new runtime that allows application developers to run containerized services within the Snowflake Data Cloud. Â
Hex has demonstrated the power of that capability by creating a full deployment of its application that, packaged as a Snowflake Native App, runs within Snowflake, allowing users to find and share insights across their organization with code, no-code, and AI. Hex on Snowpark Container Services will provide enhanced security and data applications.
In this blog, we’ll introduce what Hex on Snowpark Container Services is and its benefits for data science, machine learning, and analytics.
What is Hex?
Hex is a rich development environment for modern analytics. It provides a rich notebook-style UI for engineers and analysts to do more with data. Users can write SQL, Python, or R code to explore, transform, and visualize data. Â
Hex also integrates with Modern Data Stack technologies like Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and more. At phData, we love Hex for data science and machine learning. We also love how easy it is to use Snowpark within Hex and how Hex Magic provides an AI assistant to accelerate development.
How Does Using Hex on Snowpark Container Services Enhance Security?
The Hex notebook UI already provides a best-in-class integration with Snowflake. It’s incredibly simple to connect Hex to Snowflake and get to work with SQL or Python using Snowpark. But running on Snowpark Container Services brings Hex inside the Snowflake security perimeter.Â
This means that security and governance teams will never have to worry about sensitive data traversing the internet or other network paths when users are working in Hex.
How Does Hex on Snowpark Container Services Accelerate Data Applications?
Hex on Snowpark Container Services will accelerate data applications in three key ways:
- Bring the work to the data – Snowpark Container Services brings the application to run inside the end-consumer’s Snowflake account, where data lives. This means that data will not have to move across cloud regions in order for it to be processed or visualized in your application. Applications always accelerate when data doesn’t have to move across the wire. Users will experience faster results when they run Hex on Snowpark Container Services.
- Horizontal and vertical scaling – Hex is the easiest way to use the Snowpark Python DataFrame API and Python UDF capabilities to scale data processing on Snowflake compute. With Hex and Snowpark Python, users can scale vertically to larger Snowflake warehouses or horizontally with multi-cluster warehouses.
- GPU acceleration – Snowpark Container Services will allow Hex kernels to run on GPU hardware. This means Hex will now provide a rich environment for building complex AI applications like neural networks and large language models (LLMs) on top of data residing in Snowflake.
Conclusion
Hex on Snowpark Container Services makes Hex the go-to notebook application for any data & analytics team. phData has first-hand experience in accelerating data modernization with Hex and Snowflake, and we’re excited to see Hex integrated as a Native Application on Snowflake. Â
If you’d like to learn more about our success with Hex, don’t hesitate to reach out!
