It’s been two weeks since I returned from the Databricks Data & AI Summit in San Francisco. The three day conference was packed with presentations and demos about interesting new features of the Databricks platform.

The following two features caught my eye:

Databricks Apps

Databricks recently published their support for custom apps. Interactive web apps are often preferred by business users compared to notebooks. It’s now possible to directly deploy an app on Databricks and have it integrate seamlessly with the rest of the platform. Currently, the price is a bit high at 15 USD per day in my humble opinion.

Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs)

DABs is Databricks’ infrastructure as code solution. It allows defining and deploying Databricks features such as workflows, apps, and pipelines by from YAML files. This approach is easily reproducible and much less fragile than clicking around in the UI.

I expect I’ll be playing a lot with these two features this year.