Interactive clusters are intended for development and ad-hoc analysis, remaining active until manually terminated. When used to run scheduled jobs or production workflows, they often stay idle between executions—leading to unnecessary infrastructure and DBU costs. Job clusters are designed for ephemeral, single-job execution and automatically terminate upon completion, reducing runtime and isolating workloads. Using interactive clusters for production jobs leads to cost inefficiencies and weaker workload boundaries.
Databricks compute costs consist of:
Interactive clusters accrue charges continuously while running, regardless of workload activity. Job clusters are provisioned on demand and shut down automatically, incurring charges only for the job’s runtime.
