- Databricks Apps, a new way to build and deploy internal data and AI applications, is now available in public preview on AWS and Azure.
- Ideal use cases include data visualization, AI applications, self-service analytics, data quality monitoring, and more.
- Supports Dash, Shiny, Grado, Streamlit, and Flask app development frameworks.
- Automated provisioning of serverless computing simplifies app deployment.
- Built-in governance with Unity Catalog and secure user authentication with OIDC/OAuth 2.0 and SSO.
We’re excited to announce the public preview of Databricks Apps. It’s the fastest way for data and AI teams to build and deploy internal applications directly on the Databricks Data Intelligence platform.
Databricks Apps allows developers to build apps natively on Databricks using popular frameworks such as Dash, Shiny, Gradio, Streamlit, and Flask. One of the key benefits of Databricks Apps is the ability to use code instead of SQL to create data applications tailored for non-technical users. This opens up new possibilities for making complex data insights accessible to a wide range of users within your organization. For example, marketing teams can leverage Databricks apps to create customized dashboards that visualize campaign performance metrics, making it easy for non-technical team members to interpret and act on data. It will be. Additionally, Databricks apps can include AI components, allowing developers to call on specific AI models when they need flexibility. This integration of AI capabilities enables the creation of advanced applications that can perform tasks such as sentiment analysis of customer feedback and predictive modeling of sales forecasts, further increasing the value of data insights for non-technical users.
The apps you build are deployed directly in Databricks and fully managed, saving your team the effort of configuring and managing infrastructure. These apps are fully managed, respecting data access controls already in place in the Unity Catalog, and using the same unified governance model to control distribution to users. Databricks Apps allows organizations to maximize the potential of their data and AI investments by creating custom applications that run seamlessly within the Databricks environment.
Challenges in building data applications
In today’s data-driven world, organizations are looking for ways to extract more value from their data assets. However, building and deploying internal data applications has traditionally been a complex and time-consuming process. Developers need to spend their time managing infrastructure instead of focusing on app development. Data governance and compliance requires manually implementing access controls. Additionally, app sharing and permissions are managed separately from other data assets, resulting in a disjointed governance experience.
Databricks Apps: Build secure data applications quickly
Databricks Apps tackles these challenges head-on, providing a powerful and simple experience for building internal data applications. By adopting Databricks Apps, your organization can enjoy many benefits, including:
easy to build
Databricks Apps helps you build apps that run directly within the Databricks environment or using tools like Visual Studio Code and PyCharm, ensuring seamless access to your data and AI models. Databricks apps allow data scientists and engineers to quickly build and iterate on apps using familiar Python frameworks like Dash, Gradio, and Streamlit. You can also choose from pre-built Python templates to quickly build flexible apps.
“Databricks Apps helped us turn our RAG proof of concept into a sophisticated, branded application. We leveraged our extensive knowledge base to build a RAG system that answered our users’ questions.” Heather Gomer, SAE International
Automatic deployment for production environments
Databricks Apps doesn’t require developers to build any additional infrastructure. Apps run on automatically provisioned serverless compute, making them easy to deploy. Databricks Apps also employ industry-leading development practices and provide seamless integration with your preferred workflows. Whether you choose to work directly within a Databricks workspace or leverage your favorite IDE, you can benefit from support for Git version control and CI/CD pipelines to operate your internal apps. You can make it ready.
“By seamlessly integrating Databricks Apps into our DevOps processes, we can quickly demonstrate and test new features with our users without requiring additional infrastructure, while providing secure, production-ready security for our internal applications.” We can provide the front end.” Lukas Heidegger, E.ON Digital Technology
Built-in governance
With Databricks Apps, your data only leaves your Databricks environment when you choose to share it. Each app has fine-grained access controls to ensure accurate data permissions, automatically managed service principals for secure inter-application communication, and automated users leveraging OIDC/OAuth 2.0 and SSO for seamless and secure user access. It is fortified with robust security measures, including authentication.
Additionally, integration with Unity Catalog’s lineage capabilities provides comprehensive visibility into the origin, transformation, and usage of your application’s data, enhancing data traceability and compliance. This integrated approach ensures that data applications comply with your organization’s policies and regulatory requirements, while making data easier to discover and driving data usage across your team.
“Using Databricks Apps, we saved many rounds with our security and infrastructure teams and were able to instantly share apps with production stakeholders.” Cesar Augusto Charara Olazo (Adi)
Common app patterns
You can use Databricks apps to build a variety of internal applications, including:
- Custom data visualization: Create dynamic, data-driven visualizations that allow business users to explore and analyze data in real time.
- AI apps: Develop applications that leverage machine learning models for tasks such as predictive maintenance, customer segmentation, and fraud detection.
- Self-service analytics: Empower business users to perform complex analysis through an easy-to-use interface, reducing the burden on data teams.
- Data quality monitor: Build custom tools to track and improve data quality.
“We have fully enabled the user-facing data interface for our Health, Safety, and Environmental Intelligence Platform with Databricks Apps. We currently host the Streamlit dashboard with semantic search tools, along with a variety of other dashboards. Masu.” Lukas Heidegger, E.ON Digital Technology
Posit (2024 Developer Tools Partner of the Year) has long believed in the power of creating applications with code-first tools that help organizations derive insights from their data. This belief led to the creation of Shiny for R, Shiny for Python, Posit Connect, and collaboration with Databricks Apps to support a variety of applications. We look forward to our continued partnership with Databricks to make CodeFirst tools as ubiquitous and accessible as possible. – Tarif Kawaf, Posit CEO
“Plotly (Databricks’ 2024 Customer Impact Partner of the Year) praises the adoption of Databricks Apps and how it enables analytics professionals to serve business users. Databricks Apps is an easy way for Databricks customers to use Databricks with Plotly’s Dash open source library in a variety of sophisticated production-grade data app use cases for which Plotly is known through its Dash Enterprise offering. We provide. ” – Dave Gibbon, Senior Director – Strategic Partnerships at Plotly
Get started with Databricks apps
Databricks Apps is now available in all workspaces in supported regions.
To create your first app, go to: + new and click app. Follow the instructions on the screen. Use your favorite source code editor to make your changes and deploy.
For detailed information on all features, please see our documentation (Available in: AWS, Azure). We can’t wait to see what you build with Databricks Apps. Start building powerful data-driven applications today and unlock new potential for your organization.
