Databricks Enterprise Lakehouse Rescue & Modernisation
Challenges
The Databricks platform suffered from unreliable pipelines, inconsistent data, weak governance, and fragmented workspaces. Poor ingestion and Delta Lake design degraded performance. These issues limited platform adoption and forced teams into constant operational firefighting instead of delivering value.
Outcomes
The modernised Lakehouse achieved ~99% pipeline reliability through redesigned ingestion and orchestration, significantly reducing operational failures. At the same time, right-sized compute and targeted Photon enablement lowered DBU consumption by 35–50%, improving overall cost efficiency.
Lakehouse Modernisation – Databricks
Challenges
Solution
Technology Stack
Outcomes
Summary: Databricks Lakehouse Modernisation Overview
One of the leading enterprises headquartered in the UK was aiming to adopt Databricks. The objective was to use Databricks as its strategic Lakehouse platform to modernise data engineering and analytics at scale. The initial Databricks deployment was successful, but the platform started breaking down under real operational load. Serious issues around pipeline reliability, data consistency and uncontrolled compute consumption began to surface as day-to-day usage increased. As these reliability and governance concerns persisted, Databricks utilisation was limited only to a small group of engineering-led teams.
Instead, significant manual efforts were required to keep the Lakehouse operational, setting the stage for a deeper platform-level investigation and recovery.
Client Problem: Databricks Performance Challenges
The enterprise wanted Databricks to unify analytics, accelerate insights, and scale data-driven decision-making.
However, business teams experienced inconsistent data availability, and reports broke without warning. It did not stop there, but the analytics delivery slowed as engineering teams struggled to keep pipelines running.
Meanwhile, platform costs continued to rise, with no clear reasoning into why or who owned the problem.
Technical Pain Points:
Databricks workspaces had grown independently across teams, each with its own conventions, permissions and deployment patterns
Unity Catalog was missing. Access was managed through ad-hoc ACLs and in some cases, even shared credentials were used
Data ingestion relied heavily on custom notebooks and manually triggered jobs, making pipelines hard to recover.
Delta tables suffered from small-file proliferation, inconsistent partitioning and unmanaged schema evolution
Delta Live Tables had been partially adopted but were unstable, poorly monitored and could not be trusted
Clusters were oversized, Photon was disabled by default and workloads shared compute with no isolation or guardrails in place.
Operational Impact of the technical pain points:
The wrong design choices made earlier led to day-to-day operational issues later.
Pipelines failed frequently and required manual intervention to restart again
BI tools queried raw tables directly, degrading performance across the platform
Engineers spent more time firefighting than delivering new data products
DBU consumption increased significantly, disconnected from actual business value.
Root Cause Analysis
Before drawing any conclusion, Cloudaeon carefully evaluated the situation and did a root cause analysis. After an end-to-end study, it was understood that Databricks was rarely the problem, but a major issue was how the platform was architected, engineered and maintained.
Several causes stood out:
Architectural issue
Multiple workspaces existed without a shared governance, ownership, or data domain model. Mismanagement of the multiple workspaces led to duplicated pipelines, conflicting definitions and fragmented accountability.
Lack of governance layer
Missing out on Unity Catalog was a major issue. Lack of centralised control over schemas, permissions, lineage, or auditing led to trust and compliance issues.
Ingestion anti-patterns. Notebook-driven ingestion lacked idempotency, schema enforcement and observability. Failures went silent, only surfacing downstream in analytics.
Delta Lake misuse
Poor file sizing, incorrect partition strategies and unmanaged schema changes gradually degraded query performance and stability.
Cost blind spots
Compute costs were incorrectly predicted as they were sized for a theoretical peak load rather than observed workload behaviour. There were no FinOps controls to surface waste or enforce accountability.
No operational ownership
Pipelines were deployed and effectively abandoned. There was no Databricks DataOps layer to monitor, alert, recover or continuously optimise the platform.
Solution Architecture: Our Databricks Lakehouse Modernisation Approach
The issue was not any single pipeline or cluster configuration, but the absence of a solid Lakehouse architecture that could scale with the increasing operational demand.
Cloudaeon’s recovery strategy focused on converging on a single, governed Lakehouse that could be run as an enterprise platform, not a collection of independent workspaces.
The target state introduced:
Centralised Unity Catalog that could govern data assets, schemas, access policies, lineage and auditability
Standardised ingestion patterns using Auto Loader and Delta Live Tables stabilisation, replacing custom notebook-driven pipelines
Explicit Bronze - Silver - Gold layers with enforced contracts and data quality expectations
Isolated, policy-driven compute for ingestion, transformation and analytics workloads
Built-in observability and cost controls, supported by operational and FinOps dashboards
How We Delivered: Databricks Step-by-Step Engineering
Instead of performing everything at once, Cloudaeon’s Databricks engineers focused on establishing a stable architectural base first, then incrementally refactoring pipelines, compute and governance on top of it.
Every single change was designed to be reversible, measurable and validated before becoming the new standard.
Consolidated existing workspaces into a shared Lakehouse architecture aligned to clear domain ownership
Unity Catalog migration with a defined catalog and schema strategy, explicit table ownership and policy-driven access controls. It was also used to classify and protect sensitive and PI data, enforcing controlled access and full auditability across the Lakehouse.
Rebuilt ingestion pipelines using Auto Loader with checkpointing, schema evolution rules and repeatable ingestion patterns
Refactored unstable pipelines into Delta Live Tables with explicit data quality expectations and managed failure handling
Optimised Delta Tables through file compaction, partition redesign and statistics management
Enabled Photon selectively for high-throughput ingestion and analytics-heavy workloads
Introduced cluster policies and job-scoped compute, along with tagging to support FinOps visibility and accountability
Implemented workflow monitoring and alerting, including standardised failure recovery patterns
Validated all changes through parallel runs and data reconciliation before final cutover
Quality Assurance framework, a standardised framework, was introduced, which unified the basic and business quality checks without failing.
Zero latency, selected workloads were designed for low-latency access, ensuring faster responses for use cases requiring near real-time data.
Ingestion patterns were designed to handle multiple source types, including batch, streaming and external systems, in a consistent and scalable way.
SDG (Synthetic Data Generation was enabled to support development and testing while avoiding the use of sensitive production data.
Zero downtime was achieved for live data using a parallel sync approach during the migration process.
The step-by-step engineering approach reduced operational risk, improved observability and incrementally restored trust in Databricks.
Technology Stack
Databricks Lakehouse
Unity Catalog
Delta Lake
Auto Loader
Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines
Lakeflow Jobs
Databricks SQL warehouse
Photon engine
Terraform
Azure DevOps / GitHub
Outcomes
The rescue and modernisation of Databricks enterprise Lakehouse resulted in the following measurable, platform-level improvements:
35–50% reduction in DBU consumption through right-sized compute and targeted Photon enablement
Achieved 99% pipeline reliability following ingestion and orchestration redesign
2–4× query performance improvement on curated analytics tables
Elimination of direct BI access to raw layers, thereby stabilising downstream workloads
End-to-end auditability and governed access across the Lakehouse
Most importantly, engineering teams shifted from reactive firefighting back to delivering new use cases.
POD & Managed Ops Transition
Cloudaeon’s Databricks experts did not stop at modernising the Lakehouse. The focus shifted from fixing immediate issues to making sure the platform stayed reliable, governed and cost optimised as usage grew.
We did not treat the engagement as a handover, but as a responsibility that moved into a dedicated POD model. This ensured the same engineering context carried forward into day-to-day operations, allowing the Lakehouse to evolve effectively.
The POD model delivered:
Ongoing pipeline optimisation and onboarding of new data sources and domains
Governance enforcement as new schemas, tables and consumers were introduced
Databricks cost optimisation and performance reviews, including proactive compute and storage optimisation
Standardisation of patterns for ingestion, transformation and analytics workloads
As the platform matured and operational behaviours stabilised, the engagement evolved into managed operations that delivered the following with clear operational accountability:
• SLA-backed Databricks DataOps, covering monitoring, incident response and recovery
• Continuous platform health checks, including reliability, performance and cost signals
• Proactive optimisation cycles to prevent drift and performance degradation over time
Conclusion
This engagement showed that Databricks issues at scale are usually architectural and operational, not tooling failures. Cloudaeon took an engineering-led approach and restored governance, standardised ingestion and introduced clear ownership. The Lakehouse became stable and reliable again. Engineering teams shifted from firefighting to delivering value.
If your Databricks platform is facing similar challenges, it is often time for a focused platform reset. Cloudaeon helps enterprises stabilise, modernise, and operate Databricks as a production-grade Lakehouse.