A Comprehensive Guide to Microsoft Azure Databricks Ecosystem

Databricks in Azure

Founded by the Apache Spark creators, Databricks is integrated with Azure to deliver an end-to-end, managed Apache Spark platform built for the cloud, allowing collaboration between data scientists, data engineers, and business analysts.

Azure Databricks is available in three environments:

• SQL Databricks
• Databricks is a data science and engineering company
• Machine learning with Databricks

Databricks SQL

Databricks SQL provides an easy-to-use platform. This enables SQL analysts to run queries on Azure Data Lake, create multiple virtualizations, and build and share dashboards.

Databricks is a data science and engineering company.

Databricks’ web-based platform provides data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers with an interactive working environment. The following are the two methods for sending data through the big data pipeline:

Batch ingest into Azure via Azure Data Factory

Stream data in real-time with Apache Kafka, Event Hubs, or IoT Hubs.

Machine learning with Databricks

Machine learning with Databricks is a complete machine-learning environment. It aids in administering services such as experiment tracking, model training, feature development, and management. It also serves models.

Pros and Cons of Azure Databricks

In this blog, we will look at the pros and cons of Azure Databricks to see how good it truly is.

Pros

• Databricks can process large amounts of data, and because it is part of Azure, the data is cloud-native.
• Clusters are simple to set up and configure.
• It has a connector for Azure Synapse Analytics and the ability to connect to Azure DB.
• It is linked to Active Directory.
• It supports a variety of languages. The primary language is Scala, but it works well with Python, SQL, and R.

Cons

• It does not work with Git or any other version control system.
• It currently supports only HDInsight and does not support Azure Batch or AZTK.

Data Management in Azure Databricks

It is divided into three sections:

• Visualization: A graphical representation of the outcome of a query.
• Dashboard: A visual display of query visualizations and commentary.
• Alerts notifications for a field returned by a query that has exceeded a certain threshold.

Management of Computing

This section will teach useful terms when running SQL queries in Databricks SQL.

• A valid SQL statement is a query.
• SQL endpoint: A resource from which SQL queries are run.
• Query history: Stores the characteristics and results of a list of previously executed queries.

Authorization

The user and the group: A user is a person who has access to the system. A collection of multiple users is nothing but a group.

• Token of personal access: An opaque string is used to authenticate with the REST API.
• Access control list: A permission assigned to a principal to gain access to an object. The ACL (Access Control List) specifies the object and the actions that are permitted within it.

Databricks Data Science & Engineering

Workspace is another name for Databricks Data Science & Engineering. It is an analytics platform built on Apache Spark. Databricks Data Science & Engineering includes all Apache Spark cluster technologies and capabilities that are open source. Spark is comprised of the following components in Databricks Data Science & Engineering:

• Spark SQL and DataFrames: This Spark module works with structured data. A DataFrame is a distributed collection of data divided into named columns. It’s much like a table in a relational database or a data frame in R or Python.
• HDFS, Flume, and Kafka support streaming. Streaming is the processing and analysis of data in real-time for analytical and interactive applications.
• MLlib is an abbreviation for Machine Learning Library, which contains common learning algorithms and utilities such as classification, regression, clustering, collaborative filtering, dimensionality reduction, and underlying optimization primitives.
• GraphX: Graphs and graph computation for various applications ranging from cognitive analytics to data exploration.
• R, SQL, Python, Scala, and Java are all supported by the Spark Core API.

Databricks Runtime

The core components that run on Azure Databricks-managed clusters provide several runtimes:

• It includes Apache Spark but also adds many new features to help big data analytics.
• Databricks Machine Learning Runtime is based on the Databricks runtime and provides a ready environment for machine learning and data science.
• Databricks Runtime for Genomics is a Databricks Runtime optimized for working with genomic and biomedical data.
• Databricks Light is the open-source Apache Spark runtime packaged by Azure Databricks.

Databricks Machine Learning

Databricks machine learning is a complete machine learning platform that includes managed services for experiment tracking, model training, feature development and management, and model serving. Databricks machine learning automates the creation of a machine learning-optimized cluster. TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and XGBoost are among the most popular machine learning libraries in Databricks Runtime ML clusters. It also includes libraries required for distributed training, such as Horovod.

• Models can be trained manually or using AutoML.
• Track training parameters and models with MLflow tracking experiments.
• Create feature tables and use them for training and inferring models.
• Model Registry allows you to share, manage, and serve models.
• We also have access to the Azure Databricks workspace, including notebooks, clusters, jobs, data, Delta tables, security and admin controls, and much more.

Easy and Fast Administration

Finally, clients find it simple to manage Azure Databricks. When the service is activated, it connects to a client’s Azure Active Directory. From there, adding users, creating clusters, and managing the workspace is simple and intuitive, with a very simple user interface. Almost everything an organization needs to configure can be done through this UI, but there is also a REST API and CLI for more advanced configuration and automation. These are tasks that a typical systems administrator is already familiar with. Because companies can spend less time laying pipes and configuring systems and more time working with their data, this simple experience typically leads to a much faster time to value.

Azure Data Services from Payoda — Microsoft & Databricks Partner

Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform that is simple, fast, and collaborative. It speeds up innovation by combining data science, data engineering, and business. This advances collaboration and makes the data analytics process more productive, secure, scalable, and optimized for Azure.

If you’re looking for your best option for collaborative, high-performing, secure, and elastic data analytics services, then you may want to explore Azure Databricks. We have a variety of options for learning more about Azure Databricks and also offer free strategic consultations with our Azure experts.

Talk to us and get started quickly with Azure Databricks to gain a deeper technical insight and explore the 5-Minute Quickstarts.