Databricks Now on AWS Databricks is the data analytics provider that created the Apache Spark analytics engine. It announced a partnership with Google Cloud to allow the deployment of its data engineering solution on another cloud platform. The San Francisco-based company is said to have “scored a trick” or won the “triple crown” by launching its solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Databricks describes its solution as the “only unified data platform across all three cloud platforms.” Amazon Marketplace now offers the AWS implementation. This announcement comes after the company raised $1 billion in Series G funding. Franklin Templeton, a new investor, led the round. He joins strategic investors AWS CapitalG, Salesforce Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. Microsoft was the lead investor in the round. Databricks users can create a “lakehouse” on Google Cloud’s elastic network, which is capable of data engineering and machine learning (ML), and analytics. Databricks now integrates to Google BigQuery’s open platform, and leverages Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE), the companies stated in a statement. This will allow its users to deploy Databricks into a fully containerized cloud environment. Databricks is built on a modern lakehouse architecture, which is cloud-based, and helps organizations eliminate the complexity and cost that are inherent in legacy data architectures,” Ali Ghodsi (CEO and co-founder of Databricks), said in a statement. “Data teams can collaborate and innovate more quickly.” This lakehouse paradigm is the driving force behind our growth and it’s exciting to see how excited our investors are about being a part. Databricks and Google Cloud have new integrations:

Databricks is tightly integrated with Google Cloud’s analytics tools, making it easier to extend “AI driven insights” across data lakes and data warehouses, as well as multiple business intelligence tools.
Pre-built connectors to integrate Databricks with BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage, Looker, and Pub/Sub.
Google Cloud’s AI Platform allows for fast and scalable model training using data workflows created in Databricks. Additionally, models built in Databricks can be deployed using AI Platform Prediction to simplify deployment.

Both Databricks as well as Google have used strategies that strongly support open source for a long time. With this announcement, they put the spotlight on their “commitment to open innovation” and open source software. They stated that the new partnership will allow the companies to continue to support open source communities, encourage open innovation, and collaborate, making it easier for joint customers, to use open-source technologies. Databricks donated its open-source MLflow machine learning platform to the Linux Foundation last year. Other vendors have also formed a Databricks/Google Cloud partnership ecosystem with the two companies. These include Accenture, Cognizant and Collibra. Databricks was created by the Spark research team at UC Berkeley, which later became Apache Spark. The Spark big data distributed processing engine powers the company’s unified analytics platform. This platform allows data science teams to collaborate with data engineers and other lines of business to create data products.