Today's massive datasets represent an unprecedented opportunity for organizations to build data-intensive applications. With this report, product leads, architects, and others who deal with applications and application development will explore why a cloud data platform is a great fit for data-intensive applications. You'll learn how to carefully consider scalability, data processing, and application distribution when making data app design decisions. Cloud data platforms are the modern infrastructure choice for data applications, as they offer improved scalability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. With a better understanding of data-intensive application architectures on cloud-based data platforms and the best practices outlined in this report, application teams can take full advantage of advances in data processing and app distribution to accelerate development, deployment, and adoption cycles. With this insightful report, you will: Learn why a modern cloud data platform is essential for building data-intensive applications Explore how scalability, data processing, and distribution models are key for today's data apps Implement best practices to improve application scalability and simplify data processing for efficiency gains Modernize application distribution plans to meet the needs of app providers and consumers About the authors: Adam Morton works with Intelligen Group, a Snowflake pure-play data and analytics consultancy. Kevin McGinley is technical director of the Snowflake customer acceleration team. Brad Culberson is a data platform architect specializing in data applications at Snowflake.