Databricks Reference Architecture

Overview

Production-ready lakehouse architecture with Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and the medallion pattern. Covers workspace organization, three-level namespace governance, compute strategy, CI/CD with Asset Bundles, and project structure for team collaboration.

Prerequisites

• Databricks workspace with Unity Catalog enabled
• Understanding of medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold)
• Databricks CLI configured
• Terraform or Asset Bundles for infrastructure

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    UNITY CATALOG                                  │
│                                                                   │
│  ┌────────────┐  ┌────────────┐  ┌────────────┐  ┌───────────┐  │
│  │  Bronze    │  │  Silver    │  │   Gold     │  │ ML Models │  │
│  │  Catalog   │─▶│  Catalog   │─▶│  Catalog   │  │ (MLflow)  │  │