Transfer Account Ownership

[colin-db]

I have the same issue as this previous user, who had their question resolved before an actionable solution was provided: https://community.databricks.com/t5/data-engineering/how-to-transfer-ownership-of-a-databricks-cloud...

I have created a Databricks Premium Account and set up a Databricks Workspace within that account for my client. I have provisioned users within the account for my client as well. Now that my project is ending, I would like to transfer the ownership of that Premium account over to my client, who has an admin user within the account, so that they can take over the administration of the account in my absence. They have already taken over the administration of the linked AWS account.

I attempted to grant my client ownership of the account by promoting them to Account Admin within the account and then having my client delete my user from the account, but the option to delete my user is not available in the User Management UI. I believe this is because I am the user that originally created the account.

As a Premium user, I do not have access to Databricks support or a support contract, which the solution provided to the linked question requires. What can I do to transfer ownership of my account to another email address without upgrading my subscription to access support? Is my only recourse to have my client create their own account and port the workspace to their account?

[jameshughes · Accepted solution]

You are going to have a very difficult time with the transfer as it can only be done on the backside by Databricks.  Your only real option would be to have your customer create their own account and migrate the workspace assets over outside of having a support contract.  Hind sight being 20/20, it is always best to have the customer create their own accounts and cloud assets for a number of reasons including integration into their IDPs.  Once done, have them provision you a user account and then promote to Account Admin so you can conduct the work you need to do.

[colin-db]

Thanks for the clear and quick response! I'll be sure to keep that in mind when setting up projects in the future.

Is there any insight as to why changing ownership of a Databricks account is so difficult? This oversight came from my end; I was familiar with AWS, in which it's very easy to swap the root account over to a different owner and email address, and I assumed it would be the same case with Databricks. What recourse do users without support contracts have if they want to change the email address that their account is tied to, for example? While I am attempting to do this to transfer ownership of my account, I can think of other reasons why this feature would be needed. For example, this feature would  allow people to swap their own account to an email address if their old one becomes inaccessible. Why is it such a hassle to perform a simple and common feature of changing an email address associated with an account?