Snowflake operates on a shared responsibility model as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. Snowflake is responsible for managing all underlying infrastructure, including hardware, software installation, patches, and updates. The customer's primary responsibility is the data itself. This includes choosing what data to load into Snowflake, performing the loading and unloading operations, managing data transformations, and controlling access to that data through Snowflake's security features.

A. Snowflake is a fully managed service; it manages all hardware and physical infrastructure.

B. Snowflake automatically manages all software installation, patching, and version updates for the customer.

C. Snowflake's metadata layer automatically manages all metadata about database objects; customers do not manage this directly.

1. Snowflake Documentation. (n.d.). Snowflake Architecture. Retrieved from https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts. "Snowflake is a true SaaS offering... Snowflake manages all aspects of software installation and updates."

2. Snowflake Documentation. (n.d.). Key Concepts & Architecture. Retrieved from https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts#database-storage. "When data is loaded into Snowflake, Snowflake reorganizes that data into its internal optimized, compressed, columnar format." This highlights the customer's role in initiating the data load.

3. Snowflake Inc. (2020). The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (p. 2155). https://doi.org/10.1145/3318464.3386125. The paper describes Snowflake as a "fully managed service," implying infrastructure management is handled by the vendor, leaving data management to the customer.