Set up a secure S3 connection to Databricks in minutes with a new external location creation flow
by Gordon Wang
Connecting Amazon S3 is one of the most important setup steps to getting value out of Databricks. External locations provide the governed connection between your S3 bucket and Unity Catalog so Databricks can read and write data securely. This setup is foundational for common workflows, from ingestion and pipelines to analytics and governance. It is also increasingly important as more people adopt LTAP (Lake Transactional/Analytical Processing), a new architecture designed to unify transactional and analytical data on a single governed foundation without the traditional overhead of pipelines, replicas, and ETL.
Today, customers authorize S3 connectivity by creating an external location, a Unity Catalog object that combines a storage path with a storage credential to authorize read and write access to your S3 bucket.
Until now, connecting to S3 has often been one of the most painful parts of getting started on Databricks. Automatic setup helps customers spend less time managing cloud infrastructure, and more time building data intelligence on top of their data.
