This is a lot of upfront work, and signing up for continuous maintenance, computing costs, dealing with vendor-specific oddities, and a host of other concerns. Whatever is gained from this (being able to sign AWS phobic clients) must be substantial.
There are some large companies that don't want to run on Amazon, so they are probably trying to court that business... but I'm surprised they went with Azure instead of Google.
I don't have to speculate, that's definitely why they went to Azure:
Retail clients have pushed Snowflake Computing to make its software available on Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure cloud.
Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia (a Microsoft vet) says that a number of retail customers “particularly a large one based in Arkansas” have “a fairly strong opinion” about the Azure availability.
The Arkansas reference is likely to Walmart, which prefers not to use competitor Amazon’s cloud.
