One Login, All Workspaces: Custom URLs for Databricks

0:04Hey folks, today I have the pleasure to host for the very first time Gordon Wong. He's like Wait, I'll let him introduce himself. That's going to be much easier. >> Awesome. Hey Yousef, thanks for having me. My name's Gordon. I'm a product manager here at Databricks. I work on our admin experience, which I'm really excited about. And today we're really excited to announce the public preview for custom URLs, which which has been,

0:27you know, doing super well in private preview and data cloud preview. Excited to talk more about that today. >> I think it would be it's going to be very helpful. I remember back in 2021 I used to work and we had many many workspaces and trust me, it was a little bit hard to understand which workspace I am using because like, you know, they have this

0:49DBC_123. I think this feature is going to be very very important for the customers. >> Yes. Sounds good. Really excited to be here. I have a slide deck presentation. So, yeah, yeah, today we're talking about custom URLs. And And what this is this is a one branded URL and login across every workspace in your Databricks account. Uh so, as Yousef

1:11mentioned, previously we had these like very obscure and hard to read URLs for every single workspace. Uh and that login session was actually specific just for that workspace. We've now solved this with like one branded kind of entry point for all of Databricks. Uh and then now we're in public preview, which we're really excited about. So, what's a custom URL? Uh This is one branded domain, so you know, for example, mycompany.databricks.com

1:34for example, uh that replaces every per workspace URL across your entire account. Uh so, previously every workspace had some obscure URL really hard to read. Uh and this this made navigating Databricks really challenging, right? Especially if you have multiple workspaces, dev, staging, and prod, or different uh workspace for different use

1:57cases. Uh you know, the navigation friction in the experience was really fragmented in the sense that every time you switch the workspace, you would actually have to log in again, right? Or if you need to navigate to a specific workspace, we saw a lot of customers actually manually bookmarking in Chrome uh the different workspaces that they have to directly navigate to, right? Uh so, how do we actually simplify this for

2:19our customers and how do we make this more of a unified experience? That's something that we've kind of uh accomplished with custom URLs. So, as I mentioned, today we're in public preview, which is really exciting, and what that means is that you can actually go and claim your own custom URL for your Databricks account. As I mentioned a little bit, uh there's like almost two classes of problems we're solving with custom URLs. The first is just really hard to share and and and uh work within

2:41Databricks with these really unmemorable workspace URLs that are super ugly. Um there's like almost like a user experience tax of like re-logging in every time we were switching workspaces. Uh and then the second is like scaling issues, right? As you incre- and as you have more workspaces on Databricks, your bookmarks start to stack up. We've seen customers get really creative of like having Excel sheets or Google sheets to even track uh the different workspaces

3:04they have access to. Um and then uh this is often obviously very difficult to brand, right? If you think about Genie 1 and the progress we're making with business users, it's really hard to actually brand your Databricks environment uh in a very easy way to share uh your your your assets through Genie 1. Uh so, what what we're talking today about is custom URLs, and I'll kind of walk

3:26through some of the key benefits and then we can get into a demo a little bit later. Uh so, one one of the obvious benefits is easier navigation. So, what this means is that you have one unified session that follows you as a user uh as you navigate the account. So, what this means is that you can navigate to yusuf.databricks.com uh if that's your account and your custom URL, and then that session

3:48actually persists across your entire uh your entire experience on Databricks, right? You don't have to re-authenticate or log in again as you're navigating through workspaces or different assets. Uh, the second is a much better Genie 1 experience. So, uh, Genie 1 again is our business user-facing interface. Uh, we can get access to dashboards, Genie spaces, and apps from one single

4:11place. Uh, this makes it a lot seamless for your business users to access Databricks, right? Instead of, uh, going to arbitrary, uh, awkward URLs, you can actually just give them the one single URL to share and then that is the that one entry point, right? Uh, in in addition, this is this is like probably one of my favorite benefits, which is that Unity Catalog lineage now actually reflects, uh, the different

4:35object dependencies across workspaces, which is really cool. So, when you're in, uh, the Unity Catalog view within your workspace, uh, and you're looking at certain table, you can actually see the downstream, uh, dependencies of that table across different jobs and different dashboards, right? So, that actually now seamlessly tracks across all the workspaces in your account. You can have that unified view, uh, that

4:59governance view that, you know, and, um, and and it it it provides a lot of clarity and oversight across all your assets. This was actually one of the more long-standing requests from, uh, customers, uh, especially on the UC side. Uh, so, we're really excited about that. The next one is a simpler disaster recovery. This is something that, you know, we'll share a bit more in the next coming months, uh, but essentially

5:22custom URLs makes disaster recovery actually much simpler in Databricks. And what this means is that there's like a single account level entry point and that ensures a failover is actually doesn't break any connections. So, we actually are able to route users to the correct workspace actually regardless of region, right? Uh, with the single, uh, single URL. And then as I mentioned before, this is a really branded experience. This gives you, uh, some

5:45somewhat of like a home on Databricks, right? Uh, you can now navigate to one single URL and access all of your Databricks versus having these obscure and, uh, you know, different URLs for everything that you're you're doing day-to-day. I'll do a short demo. >> I think that's my favorite part. And, Gordon, I have a question. You talked about bringing a whole new experience,

6:08and I think for some they might think those are shiny tiny details, but trust me, it's like the cherry on the top of the pie. You want once you have it, you going to love it because those tiny details makes really the difference. Yes. And regarding the personalization of the workspace, can you give us more insights in case we have many environments? How

6:32uh, we're going to transition, for example, between dev workspace to production or staging? >> Yeah, I think so, transitioning between workspaces, it does not require reauthentication, but I think your question is more of making sure you're in the right workspace between dev, staging, prod. The URL today in the parameter is actually the workspace ID. So, it doesn't respect reflect the

6:55workspace name yet. It's something that we're thinking through internally of how to better support this. I know a lot of customers have asked for this. Uh, in the meantime, we do have something called workspace labels. As you can actually apply like a custom colored label to every one of your workspaces. And we see that as like a way to visually distinguish between the different workspaces you have. For example, you can create like a red label

7:18for prod and then a yellow label for different staging workspaces that you have. But we hope to plan to actually introduce this directly in the URL parameter as well. Uh, so that's a lot seamless for customers, but, uh, yeah, more more to come on that. >> Amazing. Thank you. >> Awesome. So, I'll share my screen and we can get started. So, I'm using a staging account to do this demo, and I'll

7:40actually share my entire window so you can actually see the URL as well, right? So, I'll do dogfood.staging.databricks.com. And then here, I've actually I can now access, you know, I'm the account admin, so I can access my entire Databricks account here, right? And then on the right side, I can actually select which workspace I want to navigate to. I can select a workspace to navigate to,

8:02so let's go to E2 dogfood. And here I'm in E2 dogfood, right? And this is one of our like main workspaces for a dogfood staging, which is internal to Databricks. But let's say I want to actually switch to this this workspace, right? Uh as you see as you can see like as I actually switched between the workspaces, I don't actually have to reauthenticate, right? So, that keeps my session persisted across Databricks, uh

8:25and I'm able to actually switch really seamlessly, right? Uh the same kind of applies for uh Genie Genie 1. So, when I here here on Genie 1 and and I've want to do any uh asset discovery, right? Any of these suggested assets that I'm clicking through uh also kind of works seamlessly across, you know, my persistent session on my custom URL. So, I don't actually

8:48have to reauthenticate every time I'm clicking through these assets. I'll go back I'll go [clears throat] back to the um I'll go back to E2 dogfood, my workspace. And what I want to share here is the UC lineage, which which was uh really really a great unlock for customers. So, here uh we [clears throat] have a test table set up. And when I click lineage now here,

9:10I can now see on the as a column like the actual workspace name for in which this table has any downstream or upstream dependencies, right? So, these are all these are uh these are also like workspaces I can zoom in here. These are workspaces that are across my account. So, here this RFA test rune, which is, you know, one of the workspaces that we were just

9:33in. You can see that uh some of these are actually downstream to this to this table in E2 dog food, right? So, the key message here is that now within Unity Catalog, you can actually see all the downstream and upstream assets across your Databricks account. You can actually see in place

9:55which workspaces actually came from, right? So, it gives you like one really clear bird's-eye view of lineage and governance across your entire entire Databricks account. >> This is amazing. Maybe some some helpful tips on how to get started. So, you know, as I mentioned, custom URLs is now in public preview. Uh there's a couple like really easy steps on how do you get started here. Uh the first step is claiming your your URL, and you can do

10:19that as the account admin for your account. So, as the account admin, go in and verify and claim your subdomain. Um as part of this process, you must actually validate your domain ownership via email OTP. Uh and then once you do so, you can actually toggle on your custom URL, which I can show really quickly as well. Uh and then step two is actually enable auto redirect. And what this means is

10:41that you can actually automatically route your legacy traffic from your old per workspace URLs, like the DBC ones that we talked to uh through briefly just now, uh and you can route that actually all to your your new branded uh custom URL domain. Uh and then step three is like now you can access your custom URL. And for example, for Genie 1, it's just mycompany.databricks.com/1,

11:04and that's your account home uh account-wide home for for all like Genie apps and and dashboards and things like that. So, maybe I can show you really quickly what this looks like from the uh account admin view. So, here I'm in the account console. Uh and if I click settings, >> [clears throat] >> in account settings, this is where you'll actually find all the configuration for custom URLs. We actually plan to

11:26uh support some other exciting things coming soon. Uh but here it's a simple toggle on. So, you'll see your custom URL when you when you toggle this on, you'll be prompted to do a email OTP. And once you once you finish that up, it would now allow you to turn it toggle it on. And then here is the auto redirect, so you can actually auto redirect what we call like all previous workspace URLs to this new to this new

11:48custom URL that that you have. >> [clears throat] >> And then just really quickly calling out like partner ecosystem tools are fully supported as part of this public preview. Uh sorry, most partner ecosystem tools are fully supported on this public preview. There are a few ones that are kind of coming as fast follows. And then all of our developer ecosystem tooling is fully supported right with the latest versioning, which

12:10we're really excited about. And then for customers that use our front end private link, so private networking for certain workspaces, we are supporting that very soon as well. So you'll be able to use your custom URL and actually use that in context of workspaces that require or use front end private link. Which is going to be great and that will kind of

12:32make sure that you know almost every you know every customer on Databricks can now get their their hands on a on a custom URL. So I'll I'll stop sharing, but yeah that's all I had. Hope this was this was interesting and yeah we're really excited to see customers adopt this and just have have a more unified and simpler experience on Databricks, right? I think as we build new products and new features it's really important to have a simple experience.

12:55And then I think custom URLs is like one step towards towards that. >> Yeah that that that's a that that's exactly what I was about to say and make sure if you are to talk with your account admins and ask them to claim as soon as possible their domain and make your workspace much easier to navigate. >> Yes. >> Bye. >> In Lake House, Databricks [music] sees

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