Thanks for the tips! This is a new cluster with DB rutime 16.4 LTS, access mode is "Dedicated". I have stopped and restarted the cluster several times and the same behavior persists. Does restarting the cluster not restart the Python kernel? If not then I need to figure out restarting the kernel. I also tried turning off and back on the debugger feature. It still won't stop at a breakpoint.

Does this really work for other people??? Or is the script debugger in the workspace a beta feature?

I appreciate the pdb suggestion, but I'm more likely to start doing my development locally in an full IDE with a real debugger that works (even though that would enatil setting up Spark locally which will take some effort)