Databricks
A unified analytics platform combining data engineering, data science, and machine learning on a lakehouse architecture.
In-Depth Explanation
Databricks is a unified data analytics platform built on Apache Spark, offering a "lakehouse" architecture that combines data lake flexibility with data warehouse performance. It's particularly strong for data engineering and ML workloads.
Databricks components:
- Delta Lake: Open storage layer
- Unity Catalog: Data governance
- MLflow: ML lifecycle management
- SQL Analytics: BI and SQL
- Notebooks: Collaborative development
Key features:
- Lakehouse architecture
- Apache Spark foundation
- Collaborative notebooks
- AutoML capabilities
- Model serving
- Delta sharing
AI/ML strengths:
- Native ML development environment
- Distributed training
- Feature store
- Model registry (MLflow)
- GPU support
- LLM integrations
Business Context
Databricks excels for organisations with complex data engineering needs and heavy ML workloads, offering a unified platform for data teams.
How Clever Ops Uses This
We leverage Databricks for Australian businesses with advanced data engineering and ML requirements, particularly those processing large-scale data.
Example Use Case
"Building an end-to-end ML pipeline in Databricks: ingesting streaming data, transforming with Spark, training models at scale, and deploying for real-time inference."