Project Context

Databricks is preparing a customer-facing migration from legacy Hive metastore-based workspace access patterns to Unity Catalog for a strategic enterprise account. The project involves a 9-person cross-functional team across DevOps, platform engineering, security, support, and technical account management, and must be completed in 8 weeks to align with the customer’s quarterly compliance deadline. The initial request from the customer is vague: “move all workloads to Unity Catalog with no disruption,” but their actual environment spans 14 workspaces, mixed job orchestration patterns, and undocumented external locations.

Key Stakeholders

The customer’s Head of Platform wants a fast migration to unblock an internal audit. Their Security Lead insists on least-privilege access, full lineage, and no temporary exceptions. The Databricks Technical Account Manager wants a smooth rollout for a renewal milestone this quarter. The internal Engineering Manager wants to avoid risky custom scripts and keep the team focused on reusable migration patterns.

Constraints

You have 8 weeks, a fixed services budget of $120,000, and no additional headcount beyond 4 DevOps engineers, 2 platform engineers, 1 security engineer, 1 TAM, and 1 support lead. Production jobs run across 14 workspaces, including 220 scheduled jobs and 35 Delta Live Tables pipelines. The customer allows only two maintenance windows, each limited to 4 hours on weekends. Any Sev-1 incident during migration will pause the rollout.

Complications

1. During the first technical workshop, the customer cannot clearly explain which workloads require external location access versus workspace-local storage.
2. A week into planning, the Security Lead rejects the proposed broad bootstrap permissions model and asks for a narrower design.
3. The customer’s finance team asks whether all 14 workspaces really need to migrate this quarter, creating scope pressure.

Deliverables

1. Define the clarifying questions you would ask in the first two stakeholder meetings.
2. Build an 8-week execution plan with milestones, dependencies, and owners.
3. Propose how you would iterate the migration approach after new security requirements emerge.
4. Recommend a phased rollout, including what to defer if full scope is not feasible.
5. Define launch success metrics, rollback criteria, and stakeholder communication cadence.