Databricks runtimes

Databricks runtimes are the set of core components that run on Databricks clusters. Databricks offers several types of runtimes.

  • Databricks Runtime

    Databricks Runtime includes Apache Spark but also adds a number of components and updates that substantially improve the usability, performance, and security of big data analytics.

  • Databricks Runtime ML

    Databricks Runtime ML is a variant of Databricks Runtime that adds multiple popular machine learning libraries, including TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and XGBoost.

  • What is Photon?

    Photon is the Databricks native vectorized query engine that runs SQL workloads faster and reduces your total cost per workload.

You can choose from among the supported runtime versions when you create a cluster.

For information about the contents of each runtime variant, see the release notes.