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Financial Services / PaymentsAssessmentCloud (AWS)

Find out where the DBUs actually go, then stop paying for idle compute

GP
Global Payments Processor

Overview

Databricks bills on DBUs, and the same notebook that costs a few dollars on a job cluster can cost several times that on an interactive all-purpose cluster left running all day. AceMQ audits actual cluster usage against the workloads that run on it and produces a costed remediation plan.

Challenge

Teams that started in notebooks tend to keep production ETL on shared all-purpose clusters because it is convenient. Autoscaling minimums get set high to avoid cold starts, idle timeouts get disabled so nobody loses their session, and cluster policies are either absent or too permissive to enforce anything. The result is a bill that grows faster than the data volume and no clear attribution back to a team or pipeline.

Environment

Databricks on AWS, Azure, or GCP, with workloads spanning notebooks, scheduled jobs, and Delta Live Tables pipelines.

Approach

AceMQ pulls system tables and cluster event logs to build a per-workload DBU profile, separating interactive exploration from scheduled production work. Each expensive workload is examined for whether the cost is compute selection, runtime, or data layout. We then define cluster policies and instance pool configuration that make the cheap path the default path rather than relying on team discipline.

Solution

  • DBU attribution by workload, team, and cluster type from system tables and cluster event logs
  • Migration of scheduled pipelines from all-purpose clusters to job clusters with ephemeral lifecycles
  • Autoscaling floor, idle timeout, and instance family review including Photon and spot suitability per workload
  • Cluster policies that constrain node types, worker counts, and DBR versions by workspace and team
  • Instance pool design to cut cold-start cost without holding warm capacity overnight
  • Tagging and chargeback model so platform spend maps to the team that generated it

Outcome

Customers get a ranked list of the workloads driving the majority of DBU spend and a policy set that keeps new work from repeating the same pattern. Most engagements identify enough idle and oversized compute to cut platform spend meaningfully without changing a single pipeline's logic.

Technologies

DatabricksApache SparkDelta LakeTerraform

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