Get started: Account and workspace setup

If you’re new to Databricks, you’ve found the place to start. This article walks you through the minimum steps required to create your account and get your first workspace up and running.

For information about online training resources, see Get free Databricks training.

Requirements

To use your Databricks account on AWS, you need an existing AWS account. If you don’t have an AWS account, you can sign up for an AWS Free Tier account at https://aws.amazon.com/free/.

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial

You can sign up for your free Databricks trial through AWS Marketplace or the Databricks website. This choice determines how you’ll be billed after the free trial ends:

Sign up through AWS Marketplace if you’d like to be billed by AWS.
Sign up through the Databricks website to be billed by Databricks and pay via credit card.

Note

Your account’s billing method is permanent. You cannot change it after signing up.

For detailed instructions on the free trial and billing, see Databricks free trial.

Step 2: Create and set up your first Databricks workspace

After you sign up for the free trial, you’re prompted to set up your first workspace using the AWS Quick Start. This deployment method creates Databricks-enabled AWS resources for you so you can get your workspace up and running quickly.

For instructions on deploying your workspace and basic set up, see Get started: Databricks workspace onboarding.

Note

If you’re more familiar with AWS and want to manually create AWS resources for your workspace deployment, see Manually create a workspace (existing Databricks accounts).

Step 3: Explore and use the Databricks platform

At this point, you have a functional Databricks workspace. To learn how to navigate the platform, see Navigate the workspace. To jump in and start querying data, run the Get started: Query and visualize data from a notebook tutorial.

Next steps

Your next steps depend on whether you want to continue setting up your account organization and security or want to start building out data pipelines:

Connect your Databricks workspace to external data sources. See Connect to data sources.
Ingest your data into the workspace. See Ingest data into a Databricks lakehouse.

Onboard data to your workspace in Databricks SQL. See Load data using streaming tables in Databricks SQL.

Build out your account organization and security. See Get started with Databricks administration.
Learn about managing access to data in your workspace. See What is Unity Catalog?.
Learn about managing access to workspace objects like notebooks, compute, dashboards, queries. See Access control lists.

Get help

If you have any questions about setting up Databricks and need live help, please e-mail onboarding-help@databricks.com.

If you have a Databricks support package, you can open and manage support cases with Databricks. See Learn how to use Databricks support.

If your organization does not have a Databricks support subscription, or if you are not an authorized contact for your company’s support subscription, you can get answers to many questions in Databricks Office Hours or from the Databricks Community.

If you need additional help, sign up for a live weekly demo to ask questions and practice alongside Databricks experts. Or, follow this blog series on best practices for managing and maintaining your environments.