I recently encountered https://data.world/datanerd/inc-5000-2016-the-full-list and was impressed by the combo of a pandas-friendly client library & centralized online tier with bells & whistles. Feels closer to that direction.
There's obviously friction in this space -- this weekend I'm playing with databricks spark notebooks and public data on S3 and the data prep will still be annoying -- so I'm looking forward to design innovation in it.
I'd like to chat more about this. Quilt uses S3 and I think we could make the process of getting data into Databricks much simpler. Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss aneesh at quiltdata dot io.
There's obviously friction in this space -- this weekend I'm playing with databricks spark notebooks and public data on S3 and the data prep will still be annoying -- so I'm looking forward to design innovation in it.