In order to create this demonstration, I used the AWS offer of a year's free access, which was available at http://aws.amazon.com/free/. This has limitations such as 5 GB of S3 storage, and 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), but it allowed me low-cost access and reduced my overall EC2 costs. The AWS account provides the following:
- An account ID
- An access Key ID
- A secret access Key
These items of information are used by Databricks to access your AWS storage, install the Databricks systems, and create the cluster components that you specify. From the moment of the install, you begin to incur AWS EC2 costs, as the Databricks system uses at least two running instances without any clusters. Once you have successfully entered your AWS and billing information, you will be prompted to launch the Databricks cloud.
Having done this, you will be provided with a URL to access your cloud, an admin account, and password. This will allow you to access the Databricks web-based user interface, as shown in the following screenshot:
This is the welcome screen. It shows the menu bar at the top of the image, which, from left to right, contains the menu, search, help, and account icons. While using the system, there may also be a clock-faced icon that shows the recent activity. From this single interface, you may search through help screens, and usage examples before creating your own clusters and code.