Which services does the Snowflake Cloud Services layer manage? (Choose two.)

The Cloud Services layer is the central coordination hub or "brain" of the Snowflake architecture. It manages and integrates all other components. Key services managed by this layer include authenticating user sessions, enforcing security policies through access control, managing transaction integrity, and maintaining all metadata for the objects and data within the system. This layer also handles query parsing and optimization, creating the execution plan that is then passed to the compute layer.

A. Compute resources: These are managed by the Query Processing layer, which consists of virtual warehouses that execute queries.
B. Query execution: This is the primary function of the Query Processing (or compute) layer, not the Cloud Services layer.
D. Data storage: This is handled by the Database Storage layer, which organizes data into optimized, compressed, columnar format in the cloud provider's storage.

1. Snowflake Documentation: Key Concepts & Architecture - Snowflake Architecture - Cloud Services.

This section explicitly lists the services managed by this layer: "Authentication"

"Infrastructure management"

"Metadata management"

"Query parsing and optimization"

and "Access control". This directly supports options C and E.

2. Snowflake Documentation: Key Concepts & Architecture - Snowflake Architecture - Query Processing.

This section describes the query processing layer

stating

"Query execution is performed in the processing layer." This confirms that option B is incorrect as it belongs to a different architectural layer.

3. Snowflake Documentation: Key Concepts & Architecture - Snowflake Architecture - Database Storage.

This section details the storage layer

explaining

"When data is loaded into Snowflake

Snowflake reorganizes that data into its internal optimized

compressed

columnar format. Snowflake stores this optimized data in cloud storage." This confirms that option D is incorrect.