Snowflake, in my circles, means something that's outside of the patterns in use and doesn't scale. It's something that's inherently bad and you want as little of it as possible, preferably make it visible and obvious, and manage it outside of your regular repositories and pipelines. Keep bringing it up at retros and planning until it's either industrialised along with the other things you support, or you drop/refactor/hand over.
Weird. In my circles, and the circles of people who are in the market for such a product, snowflake indicates a particular design pattern for designing data warehouses.
You’re both right. Snowflake as a technical slang/jargon generally refers to “flaky” or light-weight solutions that aren’t expected to withstand the test of time/scale.
Snowflake, the data warehousing platform, on the other hand is a juggernaut - in a league of it’s own (I suppose comparable to BigQuery and RedShift).
Terrible name for a product!