The Cloud Services layer in Snowflake is responsible for various services, including security (like authentication and authorization) and metadata management (like query parsing and optimization). References: Based on general cloud architecture knowledge as of 2021.

The USAGE_VIEWER role is the minimum required to view metadata and definitions of governance- enabled or secure objects like secure materialized views.
Reference:
Snowflake Docs: Governance Roles

In a multi-cluster warehouse with an economy scaling policy, queries will wait in the queue for 2 minutes before another cluster is started. This is to minimize costs by allowing queries to queue up for a short period before adding additional compute resources. Reference: [COF-C02] SnowPro Core Certification Exam Study Guide