Snowflake's architecture is unique in that it combines elements of both traditional shared-disk and shared-nothing database architectures. This hybrid approach allows Snowflake to offer the scalability and performance benefits of a shared-nothing architecture (with compute and storage separated) while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility of a shared-disk architecture in managing data across all nodes in the system. This results in an architecture that provides on-demand scalability, both vertically and horizontally, without sacrificing performance or data cohesion.