https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/intro-key-concepts.html
The cloud services layer is a collection of services that coordinate activities across Snowflake. These services tie together all of the different components of Snowflake in order to process user requests, from login to query dispatch. The cloud services layer also runs on compute instances provisioned by Snowflake from the cloud provider.
Services managed in this layer include:
Authentication
Infrastructure management
Metadata management
Query parsing and optimization
Access control