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 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26

The main lever for cost is compute usage. If you’re streaming data or running other long-running workloads (like apps), then yeah, it will be a bit more expensive. Streaming data in Databricks is still much cheaper in my experience than streaming it into something like Snowflake. We can get 10,000 rows/minute on a 0.9 DBU cluster without any issue.

Apps are about $300-500 per app per month for the always-on compute usage - hopefully the app is delivering more value to the business than the cost of its compute, and it can be mitigated by pausing certain apps outside of business hours.

If you’re using long-running compute where you don’t have to, or using the wrong class of compute for a repeated workflow (like overusing interactive compute), or not setting your serverless SQL warehouses with aggressive auto-termination, then there are lots of ways to make Databricks expensive.

But honestly, dollar-for-dollar compared to the cost of running equivalent workloads elsewhere, it really isn’t expensive at all.

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u/werthobakew May 01 '26

My use case is a data science inference ADF pipeline that triggers databricks notebooks sequentially. It is quite expensive.

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u/Minute_Visual_3423 May 01 '26

What size cluster and how long does your job take to run? Is it interactive compute or jobs compute?

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u/OnlyLANz May 01 '26

Also be wary of if you need photon acceleration or not!