How does reported billing in Azure relate to Databricks?

[raffael]

Hi,

I'm confused by how costs in Azure relate to costs in Databricks. I'm currently on Azure Pay-as-you-Go and Databricks Trial. There's nothing on my Azure account going on apart from Databricks.

This is the costs bar chart on Azure (€):

This is the costs dashboard from Databricks ($):

And the SKU perspective of the costs in Databricks:

1$ = 0.88€ and 1€ = 1.14$

Let's take April 9:

Databricks: 4$ SQL, 7.9$ ALL_PURPOSE
Azure: 3.4$ VMs, 1.1$ Storage
My first question would be; am I correct to assume that I have to pay the sum of all those costs for April 9? Meaning:

I pay 11.9$ to Databricks
And I pay 4.5$ to Azure
Is that correct?

If I am not mistaken then SQL at Databricks means Serverless SQL which is hosted by Databricks and not related to Azure - is that correct? At least I never see any compute spinning up in Azure when I use SQL on Databricks.

But ALL_PURPOSE on Databricks of course is running on Azure VMs for which I have to pay 4.5$ to Azure and 7.9$ to Databricks. My question here would be - isn't that a bit much? I pay twice the amount to Databricks for something running on Azure that I also have to pay for separately (to Azure)?

I hope my question isn't too confusing. I'm just trying to understand what's going on. Nobody likes surprise with regard to costs.

Thanks

[SP_6721 · Accepted solution]

Hi @raffael 

Yes, you're right. You pay $11.9 to Databricks and $4.5 to Azure, totalling the sum of both. Databricks bills you for the service (DBUs) and Azure for the infrastructure (VMs, storage).

And SQL Serverless is fully managed by Databricks, so only Databricks charges apply.

Regarding all-purpose compute, it runs on Azure VMs, so you pay Azure for infra and Databricks for platform usage. It’s not double billing, just a split between infra and service.

To save on cost, consider using Job clusters, which are more cost-efficient than All-Purpose clusters.

[raffael]

Thanks.

I can't find a documentation on how DBU translates to $/€. The pricing calculator only works for AWS/GCP. Where would I find that info?

[SP_6721]

The Databricks pricing calculator currently only supports AWS and GCP, so it doesn't show direct $/€ conversions for DBUs on Azure or other platforms.

For Azure pricing specifically, we can refer Azure Databricks pricing page here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/databricks/ and the pricing may vary depending on our organization's agreement with Microsoft or Databricks.