Delta Live Tables provides and API for 'declarative data flow'. Instead of writing the code to manually read in data, apply transformations, and write it out, Delta Live tables instead asks you to declare the input source, the transformations, and the intended output source. The managed runtime will automatically optimize under the covers and perform the required reads, bookmarking, and compute logistics. It is very similar to how Terraform is declarative for building cloud infrastructure, whereas Delta Live Tables are declarative for data tables.