Databricks Community

Remon · Thursday

Hi,

I am using a 14-day Databricks commercial trial with promotional credits on an AWS Tokyo workspace

I am specifically trying to access the documented "databricks-gemini-3-8-flash" Foundation Model, but it is not available through Unity Gateway / Model Serving in my workspace.

What I have already checked:

- "databricks-gemini-3-8-flash" appears under the "system.ai" catalog / registered models.

- My workspace is in the AWS Tokyo region.

- I checked the relevant workspace AI and feature settings.

- I checked Unity Gateway / Model Serving, but I cannot find a Gemini model service or callable endpoint.

- I also tried calling the model endpoint directly through the API.

The API returns:

"NotFound: The given endpoint does not exist, please retry after checking the specified model and version deployment exists."

I contacted Databricks Support, but they informed me that my account is classified as an individual account without a support contract and recommended that I post the issue here in the Community.

Could someone from Databricks please clarify:

1. Is "databricks-gemini-3-8-flash" available on the 14-day commercial trial?

2. If it is available, why does the model appear in "system.ai" but not as a callable endpoint in my workspace?

3. Does my workspace require any additional entitlement, backend provisioning, or activation?

4. Is there any workspace setting I need to enable, or does Databricks need to provision the model for my account?

Thank you.

Louis_Frolio · Thursday

Hello @Remon , I took a look at both internal and external documentation and here is what I found.

This looks like a model availability or routing issue, not a missing custom endpoint. Seeing databricks-gemini-3-8-flash under system.ai doesn't mean it's enabled for your workspace. That catalog is a global list of everything Databricks hosts anywhere. Whether a callable model service exists in a given workspace depends on region, cross-Geo settings, serving capacity, and your permissions. The docs say this plainly on the Unity Gateway models page, so NotFound here is consistent with "listed but not materialized," not a broken workspace.

The most likely cause is cross-geography routing. Gemini 3.8 Flash is hosted on a global endpoint, and its model page states it requires cross geography routing to be enabled. Your Tokyo workspace is in the Asia Geo, so requests have to be allowed to leave that Geo. It's normally on by default outside the US and EU, but it's off if a compliance security profile is enabled, and it's a per-workspace toggle that's easy to miss. To check:

Sign in to the account console (https://accounts.cloud.databricks.com/) as an account admin. If you set up the trial, that should be you.
Click Workspaces and open your Tokyo workspace.
Open the Security and compliance tab.
Make sure "Enforce data processing within workspace Geography for Designated Services" is turned off.

Then look for the system.ai.gemini-3-8-flash model service in Unity Gateway and confirm your user can query it.

Second, check the request shape. There are three API paths now, and mixing identifiers across them produces exactly the error you quoted:

Unity Gateway unified API: POST to https://<workspace-url>/ai-gateway/mlflow/v1/chat/completions with "model": "system.ai.gemini-3-8-flash"
Native Gemini API: https://<workspace-url>/ai-gateway/gemini/v1beta/models/system.ai.gemini-3-8-flash:generateContent
Legacy Model Serving: https://<workspace-url>/serving-endpoints/databricks-gemini-3-8-flash/invocations

Sending system.ai.gemini-3-8-flash to /serving-endpoints/, or databricks-gemini-3-8-flash to /ai-gateway/, fails with NotFound even when everything is provisioned correctly. Pay-per-token models are managed services, so you shouldn't need to create any endpoint yourself.

A quick isolation test: try system.ai.gemini-3-7-flash or system.ai.claude-sonnet-4-6 first. Both are listed for ap-northeast-1 without the cross-Geo requirement. If those work and 3.8 Flash doesn't, it's the Geo setting. If none work, it's the request shape or entitlements.

Your four questions, in order:

Trial availability: neither the public docs nor our internal references confirm or deny a trial-specific restriction on this model. If region, routing, identifier, and permissions all check out and it's still absent, that's the point where Databricks would need to verify trial entitlement or backend provisioning.
Listed but not callable: global catalog listing versus regional availability, as above.
Entitlements or provisioning: you need Unity Catalog enabled, the Workspace access entitlement on your user, and the cross-Geo setting. No ticket should be needed.
Workspace setting: the account console toggle above. A metastore admin can also restrict which system.ai models users may query, though on a fresh trial that's unlikely to have changed.

One caveat. The region availability table lists databricks-gemini-3-8-flash for ap-northeast-1 without the cross-Geo marker, while the model's own page says it requires it. The two pages aren't perfectly consistent, so the toggle is the practical test. If you flip it, fix the request shape, and still get NotFound, reply here with your cloud and region, the exact identifier and API path, a timestamp, and the sanitized error (no tokens or credentials, please). I'll take another look.

References: