[Feature Request] Visibility of plans or diffs during DAB deployment

[yb-yu]

When deploying with the Databricks Asset Bundle (DAB), Terraform plan and apply are internally executed.

Is there any plan to support an option that allows users to directly view this plan?

(It would be beneficial to have a sort of dry run feature)

In a CI/CD, I'd like to review the plan and then make an decision on whether to proceed with the deployment or not.

[andrewnester]

Thanks for the feature request! It's in line with our vision for DABs as well but this feature hasn't been prioritised yet, so unfortunately no ETA at the moment. As a prerequisite for this feature, we need to revisit and redesign how DABs do the deployments with or without relying on Terraform for this which is non-trivial amount of work.

[bgrams]

redesign how DABs do the deployments with or without relying on Terraform for this

@andrewnester is the vision to move away from using Terraform internally? Our use case for this feature would be to run policy checks against a machine-readable plan in order to gate automated deployments, and it'd be nice for that logic to be consistent across our many TF/DAB projects.

[andrewnester]

@bgrams we don't yet have anything set in stone regarding the future design and Terraform role in it but we always consider and encourage others to consider Terraform provider in DABs as an implementation which in future may or may not change and we discourage relying directly on anything Terraform related in DABs because of this, including exposing TF plan as-is.

And indeed as you mentioned, having consistency in how DABs work whatever internal implementation is is really important

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[yb-yu]

Any plans?

[andrewnester]

We haven't yet started to work on this particular feature but we're picking up work on the underlying core changes needed such as moving away from Terraform this quarter so we expect to have some progress in the coming months