Create a serverless workspace

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Serverless workspaces are in Public Preview.

A serverless workspace is a workspace deployed in your Databricks account that comes pre-configured with serverless compute and default storage, providing a fully-managed, enterprise-ready SaaS experience.

Serverless workspaces are ideal for many use cases. They can be a production-level environment for organizations that exclusively use serverless compute, or a composable, short-lived environment for internal training and testing. Additionally, account admins without permission to provision traditional cloud infrastructure can still deploy and manage serverless workspaces.

For guidance on how to use serverless workspaces, see Best practices for serverless workspaces.

Requirements

The serverless workspace must be deployed in a region that supports serverless compute. See Serverless availability.

Compute in serverless workspaces

All workloads in serverless workspaces are powered by serverless compute. Serverless compute uses environment versions instead of traditional Databricks Runtime versions. This allows Databricks to deliver performance improvements, security enhancements, and bug fixes without requiring any code changes to workloads.

For information about the types of serverless compute available on Databricks, see Connect to serverless compute.

Storage in serverless workspaces

Serverless workspaces come with default storage. Default storage provides you with a fully managed storage location that you can use in your workspace. For more information about default storage, see Default storage in Databricks.

Using data in your cloud storage

You can also create a connection between a cloud storage account and your serverless workspace. Among other things, this allows you to ingest raw data into your workspace, create and read managed tables in secure cloud storage, create external tables, and read and write unstructured data.

For instructions, see Connect to cloud object storage using Unity Catalog.

Serverless workspace billing and costs

Databricks usage is logged in your account's billable usage system table (system.billing.usage). If you have a private offer with Databricks, it will apply to serverless workspace usage. But, because serverless compute and default storage are not deployed in your cloud account, your cloud-provider credits or discounts do not apply to this usage.

If you connect your serverless workspace to your external cloud storage, the associated storage and data-access costs are billed directly by your cloud provider and appear in your cloud billing console. This can include networking charges for data accessed during task execution. Your cloud-provider credits or discounts may apply to these costs.

If you purchased your Databricks subscription through AWS Marketplace, serverless workspace charges also appear in your AWS Billing and Cost Management Console under the service name Databricks.