In today's rapidly evolving tech landscape, the ability to quickly test ideas and bring them to life is critical. As developers, we're often brimming with innovative concepts we'd love to explore-but turning those ideas into working applications can be time-consuming and complex.
What is Databricks Apps
That's where Databricks Apps makes a difference. It offers a streamlined way to prototype, build, and deploy applications directly within your Databricks environment-without the overhead of traditional infrastructure setup.
No more dealing with provisioning resources, managing access controls, or navigating networking hurdles. Everything you need is integrated into the Data Intelligence Platform, enabling you to focus on what matters most: innovation.
So, let's dive in and see just how quickly we can bring an idea to life using Databricks Apps.
A Real-world Scenario: Building an ML Admin Portal for Live Monitoring
Imagine deploying a monitoring and feedback application to oversee your organisation's most critical machine learning models. Building it with Databricks Apps will allow:
- Rapid App Deployment: Build and deploy the Gradio-powered admin portal directly within Databricks, eliminating the need for external web services.
- Security by Design: Leverage Databricks' built-in workspace authentication and Unity Catalog for fine-grained access control - ideal for sensitive inference data and model feedback.
- Native Integration: Connect seamlessly to Delta Tables and MLflow for real-time inference tracking, feedback logging, and model metadata access.
Admins can monitor predictions, give feedback, trigger model refreshes, and visualise model behaviour — all in one place, close to the data and models.
The Challenge
If your organisation depends on a machine learning model for critical decisions, such as predictions, recommendations, or classifications, ensuring its reliability and performance in production is essential. This requires more than just deployment: you need a centralised system to monitor predictions, collect human feedback, track model behaviour over time, and trigger retraining when needed.
Traditionally, implementing such an admin portal would require setting up multiple backend services, data pipelines, dashboards, and authentication layers — all while ensuring low latency and data consistency. Managing this through conventional cloud infrastructure (like Azure App Services) often means juggling REST APIs, resources and Networking considerations.
Speed & Simplicity: Databricks Apps in Action
Databricks Apps simplifies this process dramatically by integrating everything into a single platform:
- Rapid Setup: Deploy sophisticated AI-driven applications in under 15 minutes with a few clicks.
- Built-in Security: Inherit robust security automatically from your Databricks workspace, eliminating manual configuration and security concerns.
- Seamless Integration: Directly access data and models through native Databricks integration — no external configurations required.
Azure App Services vs Databricks Apps: The Showdown
Let's clearly outline the advantages:
| Feature | Databricks Apps | Azure App Services | |
| 1 | Setup Time | 15 minutes | ± 30 minutes |
| 2 | Security | Built in | Custom setup required |
| 3 | Cost (per hour) | 0.5$ | 0.19$ |
| 4 | Deployment Complexity | Low (1 CLI command) | Moderate |
| 5 | Internal Integration | Native Databricks assets | Networking and Roles config |
| 6 | External User Access | Limited | Easier |
Simplified Architecture with Databricks Apps
With Databricks Apps, your complex infrastructure (Figure 1) shrinks into a neatly integrated environment (Figure 2: Databricks Apps Architecture on Azure), simplifying the architecture significantly:
- Unified Environment: All resources reside in the Databricks ecosystem, providing secure and seamless communication.
- Built-in AI and ML Model Serving: Easily integrate AI and ML model serving endpoints without additional setup or external services.
- Data Access: Simplified, secure access to Databricks SQL warehouses and Unity Catalog volumes directly from your application.
Let's look at how smooth the deployment process is:
Why Databricks Apps
- Rapid Market Entry: Deploy sophisticated solutions instantly, giving your business a competitive advantage.
- Ease of Management: Focus entirely on innovation rather than infrastructure.
- Integrated Scalability: Effortlessly scale your applications in response to changing demand.
To get started even more rapidly with Databricks Apps, Databricks provides free access to a cookbook including code snippets for some functionalities around core topics like running a vector search or accessing a table.
Final Thoughts
Databricks Apps empowers organisations to rapidly deploy secure, data-rich, AI-powered applications, significantly outperforming traditional solutions like Azure App Services in simplicity, integration, and speed. For teams committed to innovation without the overhead of complex setups, Databricks Apps is clearly the ideal choice.
Nevertheless, it's still early days in our journey with Databricks Apps, the initial results are undeniably promising. For simple apps and new ideas popping up across your teams, Databricks Apps clearly provides the framework for fast ideation and deployment of apps.
Moreover, when building a more complex application that would require access to external services and resources and managing access across your organisation, other services (AWS Lambda or App Services) provide a better integration and allow for more complex use cases and flexibility.
For us at element61, Databricks Apps has proven to be a strong enabler-bringing together data engineering, AI, and application development into a cohesive, scalable environment. As data and AI technologies continue to advance, platforms like this will play a pivotal role in helping organisations innovate and respond quickly to change.
We at element61 are keeping a close eye on how Databricks Apps evolves-and we're excited to share more insights and discoveries with you soon.
More information
For more information, please contact us!
