Amazon Web Services has a knack for entering new businesses that its customers happen to be in, but one AWS customer—database startup Snowflake—has given the internet retailer’s cloud unit a taste of its own medicine.  

Snowflake launched its first product on the cloud computing service in 2015, putting it in direct competition with an AWS online database service called Redshift, introduced in 2012. Four years later, Snowflake’s sales, valuation and funding are soaring, which have made it another top prospect for an initial public offering in the hot software-as-a-service sector. In an interview, CEO Bob Muglia said the company won’t go public this year, but could do so next year or the year after.