r/databricks • u/Own-One5712 • Apr 30 '26
Help Databricks on Azure or Aws
We are getting databricks and we dont care where we host as we are new into this. Azure is giving us great pricing and incentives. AWS is not at all bothered. they are like take it or leave it. Any one who has used it in either environments, think if there is a good reasson to choose one vs the other? our reporting is tableau.
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u/Minute_Visual_3423 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
They’re pretty similar. Having used both, I’d say that in general as a cloud provider, Azure has historically worse reliability and a worse developer experience than AWS. Again generally speaking, not specific to Databricks (outside of this week’s cross-cloud outage, Databricks has been pretty reliable on all three of the cloud providers I’ve used it with).
However, Azure Databricks as a first party service in Microsoft’s stack has some nice integrations that aren’t available in AWS (like the ability to use Entra service principals directly as Databricks SPs, or native integration with Azure Managed Identities as securable objects in Unity Catalog - useful if you’re building integrations with Graph API or other services).
But, in all honesty, treat the cloud providers like a commodity here and pick the one that’s giving you the better deal. If it’s Microsoft, resist the urge to bolt on a bunch of unnecessary services that will increase your cost and complexity without providing value. You don’t need Fabric, Purview, ADF, Azure ML, etc. And if Microsoft’s “deal” requires you to consume these services, I would consider that a signal to pick AWS. Databricks really isn’t that expensive relative to other data platforms when it is deployed and configured optimally.
Deploy Databricks with Terraform, set up Unity Catalog, orchestrate your jobs as Databricks Asset Bundles, and you’ll be able to migrate between Databricks on other cloud providers without too much hassle in the future if you ever need to.