Build a Governed Databricks Workspace with Pulumi

Platform teams managing Databricks face challenges with inconsistent cluster policies, high costs, and security gaps due to manual configurations, which lead to fragmented environments that are difficult to govern. To address these issues, standardizing Databricks environments with Pulumi can provide a unified, governed workspace, enabling faster data team operations without sacrificing governance. The article outlines how to provision a standardized Databricks workspace using Pulumi, creating cluster policies, secret scopes, permissions, and automated jobs. It emphasizes understanding the boundary between account-level and workspace-level resources, configuring credentials securely with Pulumi ESC, and managing resources within a Databricks workspace. By employing Pulumi for infrastructure as code, teams can ensure consistent deployment of cluster policies, permissions, and other resources across multiple environments, aligning development and production while maintaining environment-specific configurations. The approach facilitates integrating Databricks management with CI/CD pipelines, enhancing the governance and efficiency of data operations.