Productionizing Data Pipelines

An infrastructure-as-code way to package Databricks projects — jobs, pipelines, notebooks, and other resources — as version-controlled YAML configuration plus source files that can be deployed reproducibly across workspaces.

Jobs and pipelines are created manually in the UI in each workspace. This is hard to reproduce, prone to configuration drift between dev/staging/prod, and not easily version-controlled.

Version control of pipeline definitions, repeatable deploys across dev/staging/prod, and easy CI/CD integration so the same config promotes through environments.

DAB uses declarative YAML configuration checked into source control, rather than imperative clicking through the UI.

The Databricks CLI — it validates, deploys, runs, and destroys bundles via commands like databricks bundle deploy.

DAB is a Databricks-native, higher-level IaC approach built on top of the same Terraform provider concepts. Terraform and the REST API are lower-level/general alternatives; DAB is purpose-built for packaging Databricks projects.