Databricks has introduced Lakehouse Apps, a new way for developers to build native, secure applications for Databricks.
The company also introduced new data sharing providers and AI model-sharing capabilities to the Databricks Marketplace and announced that Databricks Marketplace will be generally available at the Data + AI Summit.
To get the next generation of innovative applications in the hands of users, software vendors must clear significant hurdles to securely access customer data, integrate with customers’ security and governance solutions, and efficiently run close to customer data.
To secure enterprise adoption, many developers have taken one of two approaches: restrict the capabilities of their application and rebuild vital parts of their application in SQL or proprietary code from data platform vendors; or build versions of their products that customers have to install and operate themselves, which are fragile and hard to scale.
Databricks says Lakehouse Apps helps developers overcome this dilemma with a native, secure, no-compromise solution.
By running directly on a users’ Databricks instance, these apps can easily and securely integrate with the users’ data, use and extend Databricks services, and enable users to interact with a single sign-on experience.
Early development partners for Lakehouse Apps include Retool, Posit, Kumo.ai, and Lamini:
- Retool enables users to quickly build and deploy internal apps, powered by their data. Developers can assemble UIs with drag-and-drop building blocks like tables and forms, and write queries to interact with data using SQL and JavaScript.
- Posit is an open source data science company that empowers data professionals with cutting-edge tools for code-first data science.
- Kumo.ai is an AI-powered platform tackling predictive problems in business. Its platform works directly on relational data by using graph neural networks, a class of AI system for processing data that can be represented as a series of graphs.
- Lamini is an LLM platform for every developer to build customised, private models: easier, faster, and better-performing than any general-purpose LLM.
Delta Sharing
Meanwhile, Databricks has also announced new Delta Sharing partnerships with Cloudflare, Dell, Oracle, and Twilio.
Delta Sharing provides an open solution to securely share live data from your lakehouse to any computing platform.
Organisations have to continuously develop innovative business solutions and products leveraging data and AI to thrive in today’s data-driven economy.
That requires an open, secure exchange of data and AI assets with customers, partners, and suppliers. However, the absence of an open standard sharing solution limited the development of an open data exchange ecosystem.
Enterprises had to replicate data across multiple platforms, clouds and regions to facilitate collaboration.
Traditional solutions also only took a data-only approach, which means organisations were limited in monetising anything beyond a dataset and experienced friction in attempting to create new revenue opportunities with non-compatible platforms.
Databricks says Delta Sharing helps organisations share and consume live data sets across platforms, clouds, and regions without dependencies on specific data sharing services, including Databricks.
Databricks adds that it is expanding the Delta Sharing ecosystem with new partners, including Cloudflare, Dell, Oracle and Twilio, to seamlessly share data between their platforms, Databricks, Apache Spark, pandas, PowerBI, Excel and any other system that supports the open protocol.
