Databricks serverless, cost

Question

I read this page https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/databricks/#pricing

and am none the wiser. What is a DBU with serverless? Do I get charged when the Databricks instance exists or when I run code on it?

Answer 1

A DBU (Databricks Unit) with serverless is a single, all-inclusive billing unit that measures the processing power your workloads consume, bundling both the Databricks software fee and the underlying cloud infrastructure costs into one rate.

You are charged when you run code or execute queries on active serverless compute. Billing begins when your query or serverless job starts processing data, and usage is measured on a per-second basis.

Unlike traditional classic clusters, where you can incur cloud infrastructure costs simply because a cluster remains running, serverless resources automatically suspend when they are no longer being used. Therefore, you do not continue accumulating DBU charges while the serverless resource is suspended or shut down.

If a serverless SQL warehouse or notebook environment is idle, it will automatically suspend according to its configured settings. Once suspended, it is no longer consuming serverless compute, so no additional DBU charges accumulate during that suspended period.

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hth

Marcin