Exactly. Let's say you have a data pipeline in dbt or your favourite transformation tool. All the source data will be in your cold storage, AWS S3, all the intermediate data (TEMP tables) is written to NVME, and then the final tables are created in S3 & registered in your catalog. AWS recently released S3 Tables, which aims to make the maintenance easier with Apache Iceberg as well: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/s3-tab...
You can use spot instances if you can afford more latency or might prefer on-demand instances and keep them warm if you need low latency. Databricks (compute) and Snowflake (warehouse) do that automatically for you for the premium price.