Databricks launches Apps for streamlined AI development

Databricks has announced the Public Preview release of Databricks Apps, designed for building and deploying internal data and AI applications.

The new tool will be available on AWS and Azure, supporting the development of applications for data visualisation, AI, self-service analytics, and data quality monitoring. It offers developers the ability to call specific AI models for increased flexibility and is equipped with governance features such as Unity Catalog and secure user authentication through OIDC/OAuth 2.0 and SSO.

Databricks Apps allows developers to utilise popular frameworks such as Dash, Shiny, Gradio, Streamlit, and Flask to create applications that are accessible to non-technical users. This includes the ability to design custom dashboards to visualize campaign performance metrics for teams like marketing, making data interpretation straightforward for users without a technical background. An example use case is performing sentiment analysis on customer feedback or predictive modelling for sales forecasts.

Once developed, these applications are deployed and managed within the Databricks environment, minimising the need for managing additional infrastructure. Unity Catalog's data access controls are maintained in the apps, ensuring a unified governance model.

In the current data-centric landscape, developing data applications can be complex and resource-consuming, mainly due to the focus on infrastructure management and manual governance implementation. Databricks Apps aims to simplify this process.

"Databricks Apps helped me turn my RAG proof of concept into a polished and branded application. We built a RAG system to answer user questions by utilising our company's extensive knowledge base," said Heather Gomer from SAE International.

Databricks Apps allows for swift deployment using serverless compute, negating the requirement for additional infrastructure setup. Developers can work within Databricks or integrate with their preferred tools like Visual Studio Code and PyCharm, leveraging Git version control and CI/CD pipelines for production-ready apps.

Upon creation, applications generate a unique URL for easy sharing among users. This feature also includes discovering applications via the "compute" and "apps" tabs, promoting internal app exploration.

Lukas Heidegger from E.ON Digital Technology noted, "The seamless integration of Databricks Apps into our DevOps processes enables us to quickly demonstrate and test new features with users while also providing a secure, production-ready front end for the internal application—all without needing additional infrastructure."

Databricks Apps ensures data security by maintaining data within the environment unless shared externally. It features robust security measures like granular access control and automatic user authentication. Additionally, the Unity Catalog's lineage capabilities enhance data traceability and compliance, aiding organizational policy adherence.

"By using Databricks Apps, we saved many rounds with the security and infrastructure team and were able to instantly share our app with stakeholders in production," said Cesar Augusto Charalla Olazo from Addi.

Various internal applications can be constructed using Databricks Apps, such as custom data visualisations, AI apps for predictive tasks, self-service analytics tools, and data quality monitors.

Lukas Heidegger added, "We realised the user-facing data interface of our Health, Safety & Environment Intelligence Platform fully with Databricks Apps. We now host a Streamlit dashboard, featuring a semantic search tool, alongside various other dashboards."

Tareef Kawaf, CEO of Posit, commented, "Posit has long believed in the power of creating applications using code-first tools to help organisations derive insights from their data. This belief inspired the creation of Shiny for R, Shiny for Python, and Posit Connect, as well as our collaboration with Databricks Apps to support a variety of applications."

Dave Gibbon, Senior Director - Strategic Partnerships at Plotly, said, "Plotly applauds the introduction of Databricks Apps and its enablement of analytics professionals to serve business users. Databricks Apps offers an easy way for Databricks customers to begin journeys toward using Databricks with Plotly's Dash open-source library for the range of sophisticated production-grade data app use cases that Plotly is known for via its Dash Enterprise offering."