Lesson 2: Azure Databricks Spark Tutorial- How to Create Azure Databricks Free Account

In this lesson 2 of our Azure Spark tutorial series I will take you through how you can create your free Azure Databricks account. I will also take you through an overview of Azure Databricks portal. In case you haven’t got through my first lesson 1 of Azure Databricks tutorial, I would highly recommend going to lesson 1 to understand the Azure Databricks from scratch. Let’s dive into the tutorial now.

Azure Databricks Spark Tutorial for beginner to advance level – Lesson 1

Contents

1 How To Create Free Databricks Account
2 Final Thoughts

How To Create Free Databricks Account

There two ways in which you can create free Databricks account need for the learning purposes as follows:

Using Databricks Portal
Using Azure Portal

Datarbricks Free account creation through Databricks Portal

Databricks provides the two types of account. One is the general purpose account which can be used for the enterprise production workload. You need to pay for this, it is not a free account.

For professional developers and students Databricks provides a free account where developers can create the account without paying anything. Here the intention of Databricks is to invite more and more developers to the portal and allow them to use the environment by doing hands-on practice.

Though this account has its own limitations like you can’t create more than one cluster and your node is some specific size and configuration only. However it is far more than what you need for the learning and practicing purpose.

Best thing with Databricks free trial account, you don’t even need to enter any credit card billing details

There are two different portals for Databricks. One is the main portal for the general purpose account and the other portal is the community Databricks portal. Here you can create a free account.

Steps to Create Free Trial Account of Databricks

Step 1: Go to the Databricks community portal : Commuity Databricks Link

Figure 1: Databricks community edition Login Page

Step 2: As we don’t have the account yet, please click on the Sign Up

Figure 2: Databricks community edition Sign up Page

Step 3: Let’s fill up the registration form with your personal details asked. Make sure you will use the valid email id which you can verify. Because Databricks will send you an email for verification to activate your account.

Figure 3: Databricks community edition Sign up confirmation Page

Step 4: Here you will see the option to create the community edition account and business account creation using any of the cloud providers of your choice. Let’s choose the community edition and click create.

Step 5: If all goes well you will get the below message saying check your email and activate your account.

Step 6: You will have the email like below in your mailbox. Just click on the link mentioned in the mail to validate your email.

Figure 6: Databricks account email verification

Step 7: You will be asked to set the password for your Databricks account. Set the strong password by typing password and confirm password.

Figure 7: Databricks account reset password page

Congratulations, your free Databricks account creation has been completed and you will be greeted with the following screen.

Limitations of the Free Databricks Account

Single cluster limited to 15GB and no worker nodes
Basic notebooks without collaboration
Limited to 3 max users
Public environment to share your work

Databricks Free account creation through AzurePortal

Prerequisite: You must have a valid Azure account first. Please check out how to create the free Microsoft Azure account.

Steps to Create Free Trial Account of Databricks

Step 1: Go to Azure portal and login.

Step 2: Search Databricks in the search bar. You will get the Azure Databricks icon just click on it.

Figure 10: Search Databricks in Azure portal

Step 3: Click on Create to create your first Azure Databricks workspace.

Figure 11: Create Azure Databricks workspace in Azure portal

Step 4: Now it will ask you to enter all your details like valid subscription name, resource group, Databricks workspace name, region in which you want to create the workspace and most importantly in the Pricing Tier dropdown select the Free 14 days trial account. Click review and create.

Figure 12: Azure Databricks workspace fill details in Azure portal

Step 5: Once validation gets passed you will get the create button, click on it to create.

Figure 13: Azure Databricks workspace creation validation in Azure portal

Step 6: Go to the created workspace and launch the workspace. It will use your active directory authentication to redirect you to Databricks portal.

Figure 14: Azure Databricks workspace dashboard page in Azure portal

Figure 15: Azure Databricks workspace to Databricks login

Step 7: You must be able to see the Azure Databricks home page now.

Figure 16: Azure Databricks welcome page

Congratulations, your free trial Azure Databricks account creation has been completed and you will be greeted with the above welcome screen.

Feature of 14 Day Free Trial Azure Databricks Account

Collaborative environment for Data teams to build solutions together
Unlimited clusters that can scale to any size, processing data in your own account
Job scheduler to execute jobs for production pipelines
Fully collaborative notebooks with multi-language support, dashboards, REST APIs
Native integration with the most popular ML frameworks (scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Keras,…), Apache SparkTM, Delta Lake, and MLflow
Advanced security, role-based access controls, and audit logs
Single Sign On support
Integration with BI tools such as Tableau, Qlik, and Looker
14-day full feature trial (excludes cloud charges)

Final Thoughts

We have learned how to create the Azure Databricks free account through Azure portal. I have also walked you through the steps needed to create the Databricks free account using the Databricks portal itself. Now by doing this you are ready with the initial environment where you can start practicing the spark, pyspark commands and doing some hands-on. In the next lesson we will see the Azure Databricks portal overview.

Azure Databricks Spark Tutorial for beginner to advance level – Lesson 1

Deepak Goyal

Deepak Goyal is certified Azure Cloud Solution Architect. He is having around decade and half experience in designing, developing and managing enterprise cloud solutions. He is also Big data certified professional and passionate cloud advocate.