Multi-Cluster Warehouse Scaling Policies in Snowflake: Balancing Speed and Cost

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Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multi-cluster-warehouse-scaling-policies-snowflake-speed-mohapatra-du0uf?trackingId=xP9nN9ecSTuF1gxQ9dl6jQ%3D%3D

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Multi-Cluster Warehouse Scaling Policies in Snowflake: Balancing Speed and Cost

Arabinda Mohapatra

Running Kafka streams after dark, diving into genetic code by daylight, and wrestling with Databricks and Tableflow in every spare moment—sleep is optional

January 29, 2026

Snowflake’s multi-cluster warehouses are designed to handle concurrency and unpredictable workloads. The key lies in its scaling policies—Standard vs. Economy.

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Standard

Cluster Start:

• Starts new clusters when queries are queued or capacity is predicted to be insufficient.
• If MAX_CLUSTER_COUNT ≤ 10: starts one cluster at a time. If MAX_CLUSTER_COUNT > 10: may start multiple clusters simultaneously.

Cluster Shutdown:

• Shuts down least-loaded clusters after sustained low load and completion of running queries.
• If cluster count > 10: may shut down multiple clusters. If ≤ 10: shuts down one at a time.

👉 Best for teams where responsiveness matters more than cost. Dashboards, BI workloads, and user-facing queries thrive here.

🔹 Economy Policy

Goal: Prioritize cost-efficiency over performance.

Cluster Start:

• Starts a new cluster only if expected load can keep it busy for at least 6 minutes. May lead to queuing but saves credits.

Cluster Shutdown:

• Marks least-loaded cluster for shutdown if it has Shutdown occurs after active queries finish.
• Shutdown behavior follows the same >10 vs. ≤10 rule as Standard Policy.

👉 Best for batch jobs, ETL pipelines, or predictable workloads where saving credits outweighs instant responsiveness.

Takeaway: Standard = speed, Economy = savings. Choose based on workload profile, not just budget.

Refer-https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/warehouses-multicluster

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