The correct answer is D. Infrastructure management .
Snowflake’s architecture includes the storage layer, compute layer, and Cloud Services layer. The Cloud Services layer coordinates many system-level services required to operate Snowflake.
Why D is correct:
Infrastructure management is handled by the Cloud Services layer. Other Cloud Services responsibilities include authentication, metadata management, query parsing and optimization, access control, and transaction management.
Why the other options are incorrect:
A. Data storage is handled by the database storage layer.
B. File compression is related to storage and data loading/unloading behavior, not the primary Cloud Services responsibility tested here.
C. Query processing is performed by virtual warehouses in the compute layer. Query parsing and optimization happen in Cloud Services, but execution/processing happens in compute.
Official Snowflake documentation reference:
Snowflake documentation describes the Cloud Services layer as managing services such as authentication, infrastructure management, metadata management, query parsing and optimization, access control, and transaction management.
[Reference: Snowflake Documentation — Snowflake Architecture; Cloud Services layer; SnowPro Core Study Guide — Snowflake Architecture., , ]
