^{This article first appeared on LinkedIn on 12 February 2025.}

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to develop a product and deliver personalized services to the users without directly accessing their data? 

It’s a fascinating challenge, especially when you are dealing with sensitive or regulated data environments. As developers, we are constantly thinking about how to build secure, scalable applications while respecting data boundaries. But isolating the data layer from the application logic?  That’s historically been tricky. 

As a product developer, my biggest priority is to ensure that my code stays airtight—secure, scalable and deployable without impacting the client’s user experience. Whether it’s an upgrade, a patch, or a feature rollout, minimizing downtime is non-negotiable. 

But let’s be honest — building an app isn’t just about clean code. It’s an entire journey that includes: 

1. Simulating data that mirrors a user’s real environment. 

2. Setting up the right infrastructure. 

3. Defining governance policies and access controls. 

4. Optimizing for performance (The constant monster in the room). 

5. And, ideally, enabling collaboration across developers to contribute to the feature pipeline. 

So with all of this to juggle— how do we streamline delivery, maintain data boundaries and yet stay developer-friendly? 

Enter: Snowflake Native App Framework 

Snowflake introduced the Native App Framework to help tackle this exact challenge.    It lets us encapsulate the application logic, metadata, data content, set up scripts all into a single modular application package. Inside it, you can define the privileges on different database objects, test the app locally first in Snowsight, and validate the end-to-end flow before touching any production data. 

Now combine this framework with Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing and Snowflake Collaboration, and you have got a recipe for truly isolated execution—where the code runs but the data never leaves the customer’s environment. 

Provider and Consumer: A Neat Abstraction 

The framework operates on a clear model— Providers and Consumers 

1. Providers build the application logic and offer services. 

2. Consumers use these services within their own Snowflake accounts. 

This setup means that the developers can focus on shipping great functionality, while the client retains their full control over their data.   And deployment? It’s super flexible. As developers we can list the app privately for internal teams or partners, or publicly in the Snowflake Marketplace to scale distribution across external organizations. 

Bonus: Monetization, Minus the Data Exposure 

What’s even more exciting is the monetization potential. By publishing a public app, you can now deliver value to different users across organizations— without compromising the privacy. This is a game changer for product teams looking to scale and monetize securely.