Databricks Community

Van-DuyetLe · ‎03-21-2018

I am new to databricks. I would like to know what is the difference between Interactive Clusters and Job Cluster? There are no official document now.

Ritesh1 · ‎08-02-2018

As per the documentation

Interactive clusters are used to analyze data collaboratively with interactive notebooks. Job clusters are used to run fast and robust automated workflows using the UI or API.

So, while in development phase, you will mostly use interactive cluster. On the other hand once you move to production where things are more in a automated way, job clusters comes in picture.

rene_nadorp · ‎10-15-2018

I think you meant "job clusters come in picture" at the end of your comment. 😉

Ritesh1 · ‎04-07-2019

Thanks for the correction 🙂

StacyKerkela · ‎12-20-2019

The documentation is a bit clearer now - https://docs.databricks.com/clusters/index.html

Databricks makes a distinction between interactive clusters and automated clusters. You use interactive clusters to analyze data collaboratively using interactive notebooks. You use automated clusters to run fast and robust automated jobs.

You can create an interactive cluster using the UI, CLI, or REST API. You can manually terminate and restart an interactive cluster. Multiple users can share such clusters to do collaborative interactive analysis.
The Databricks job scheduler creates an automated cluster when you run a job on a new automated cluster and terminates the cluster when the job is complete. You cannot restart a job cluster.