Hosting Spark Jobs in Azure (without any SaaS Premiums) There are numerous platforms in the wild that have embedded Spark (Fabric, ADF, Databricks, HDI, Azure Synapse and so on). Most of the vendors love to put a "value-added" layer of SaaS crap on top of Spark and package as a premium bundle. Even Databricks has discontinued their standard tier in Azure and is forcefully pushing customers to use their "premium" tier. ... This upselling to a SaaS platform is pretty frustrating. It reminds me of the process of purchasing Red Hat Jboss AMQ for on-premise messaging. When the customer would say we need to send and receive messages, that is NOT good enough for a Red Hat salesrep. They want to sell EVERYTHING they have in their portfolio, including the kitchen sink. They eventually tell you that the AMQ is off the menu, and they make you buy their "JBoss Enterprise Application Platform" maintenance (ie. they force you to buy tons of crap you don't need).…