Lessons from Large-Scale Software as a Service at Databricks

The cloud has become one of the most attractive ways for enterprises to purchase software, but it requires building products in a very different way from traditional software, which has not been heavily studied in research. I will explain some of these challenges based on my experience at Databricks, a startup that provides a data analytics platform as a service on AWS and Azure. Databricks manages millions of VMs per day to run data engineering and machine learning workloads using Apache Spark, TensorFlow, Python and other software for thousands of customers. Two main challenges arise in this context: (1) building a reliable, scalable control plane that can manage thousands of customers at once and (2) adapting the data processing software itself (e.g. Apache Spark) for an elastic cloud environment (for instance, autoscaling instead of assuming static clusters). These challenges are especially significant for data analytics workloads whose users constantly push boundaries in terms of scale (e.g. number of VMs used, data size, metadata size, number of concurrent users, etc). I'll describe some of the common challenges that our new services face and some of the main ways that Databricks has extended and modified open source analytics software for the cloud environment (e.g., designing an autoscaling engine for Apache Spark and creating a transactional storage layer on top of S3 in the Delta Lake open source product).