What you’ll do
For a guided choice between paths, see Choose setup path.
Step 1 - Sign up
Sign up and log in to an e6data account. You’ll enter your email, get a magic link, and complete your profile.Step 2 - Pick your cloud and choose a deployment type
In the Control Plane, click Workspaces → Create. Choose between:- Serverless - fastest to start. e6data manages the compute environment.
- In Your VPC - compute runs inside your own Kubernetes cluster. Pick this if network isolation is a hard requirement.
- AWS: Serverless | In Your VPC
- Azure: Serverless | In Your VPC
Step 3 - Grant e6data access to your storage
Each cloud has a different mechanism, but the principle is the same: create a cloud-native identity, grant it read access to the data you want to query, and federate it with e6data. No long-lived credentials are shared.- AWS - IAM role with EKS Pod Identity (or IRSA).
- Azure - User-Assigned Managed Identity with federated credentials.
Step 4 - Connect a catalog
Once the workspace is provisioned, click Open to enter the Compute Plane. Then:- Go to Catalogs → Create.
- Choose the metastore type (Hive Metastore, AWS Glue, Databricks Unity, Microsoft Fabric, Apache Polaris, Iceberg REST, or AWS S3 Tables).
- Fill in the connection details.
- Click Test Connection to verify, then Create Catalog.
Step 5 - Create a cluster
- Go to Clusters → Create.
- Name the cluster (for example,
analytics-dev). - Choose a Cluster Runtime version and a Cluster Size.
- Select one or more catalogs to connect.
- (Optional) Enable Auto-Suspension and Auto-Resume so the cluster pauses when idle.
- Click Create Cluster.
Step 6 - Run a query
- Open the SQL Editor in the Compute Plane.
- Select your cluster and catalog.
-
Type a query:
- Click Run.
What’s next
- Connect a BI tool or driver: JDBC, Python, the REST API, or the PostgreSQL protocol.
- Invite teammates and grant roles: Identity and RBAC.
- Set up cost guardrails: Suspend and resume.
- Read the FAQs for your deployment path: AWS Serverless, AWS In-VPC / CloudPrem, or Azure Serverless.