A hands-on preview of Genie ZeroOps, Databricks' autonomous agent for monitoring and fixing data pipeline issues — tested against a data overflow bug, a division-by-zero error, and a live migration.

Databricks Asset Bundles direct mode is now GA, and it's already the default for bundles created from the workspace, with full CLI default rollout on August 26, 2026. By removing the Terraform dependency, direct mode cuts deployment time by up to 40%, replaces opaque state with human-readable JSON, and unlocks resources like instance pools and Genie Agents that Terraform-gated releases used to delay.

Does 'streaming means Kafka' still hold for single-sink ingestion into Delta? We benchmarked it with 64.8 million real events and found a cost gap that never closes, 3.6× to 20.9×