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.
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.
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.