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.

• Photon runtime

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

• Databricks Light

  Databricks Light provides a runtime option for jobs that don’t need the advanced performance, reliability, or autoscaling benefits provided by Databricks Runtime.

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.