Here’s a breakdown of Databricks environments, key concepts, and how they are used:

What is a Databricks Environment?

In essence, a Databricks environment encapsulates the following:

• Workspace: A dedicated area within the Databricks platform where users collaborate, store data, create notebooks, schedule jobs, develop machine learning models, and more.
• Compute Resources: The processing power in clusters (groups of servers) that fuel data transformations, analytics, and machine learning tasks.
• Data Storage:  Integration with cloud object storage (e.g., AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage) and the Databricks File System (DBFS) for managing data.
• Libraries and Runtimes: Customizable software libraries and preconfigured runtimes (e.g., Python, Scala, R, SQL) tailored to specific data workloads.

Key Concepts

• Workspaces: A workspace is a container for all Databricks assets. Your organization might have multiple workspaces to separate development, testing, and production environments.
  • Clusters are the core computational units in Databricks. You create clusters to run jobs, notebooks, and other data-processing tasks. Clusters can be All-purpose clusters Used for general data engineering, exploration, and interactive analysis.
  • Job clusters: Automatically created and terminated when a job is run, providing optimized resource usage.
  • SQL Warehouses: For high-performance, low-latency SQL queries and dashboarding.
• Databricks File System (DBFS): A distributed file system integrated with cloud storage, providing a seamless way to store and access your data in Databricks.
• Notebooks: Interactive coding environments supporting Python, R, Scala, and SQL. These are the primary workspace for data exploration, transformation, and machine learning.
• Jobs: Scheduled tasks used to automate and run repetitive workflows (ETL processes, machine learning pipelines).
• Machine Learning Environment: Provides managed services for experiment tracking (MLflow), feature engineering and storage (Feature Store), and model deployment (Model Serving).

Isolation and Management

• Account Isolation:  A Databricks account is the foundational point of isolation. Accounts can have multiple workspaces, and data/assets cannot easily be shared between accounts.
• Workspace Isolation: Workspaces within an account provide robust isolation for different teams and projects.
• Within a Workspace: You can use permissions, cluster access controls, and libraries to manage further how users interact with data and resources.

Databricks Community Edition

• A free version of Databricks, ideal for learning and experimenting. It has some limitations compared to the paid versions (e.g., cluster size and lack of certain features). You can find it at  https://community.cloud.databricks.com/