Set Up Unity Catalog with External Storage

Create a Unity Catalog catalog backed by an external S3 bucket with storage credentials, external location, and a schema ready for lakehouse tables.

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When done, you will have:

An IAM role granting Databricks access to your S3 bucket
A storage credential and external location registered in Unity Catalog
A Unity Catalog catalog using your external S3 bucket as its storage root
Infrastructure ready for Sync Tables, cross-account access, or custom lifecycle policies

This template creates a Unity Catalog catalog backed by an external S3 bucket and requires AWS-specific privileges both in Databricks and in AWS IAM.

AWS workspace. This template uses S3 and IAM; it does not apply to Azure or GCP workspaces. Confirm your workspace host is *.cloud.databricks.com.
Unity Catalog enabled on the workspace. Run databricks catalogs list --profile <PROFILE> and confirm the command succeeds (the system catalogs main and system should appear). A not enabled error means the workspace is not attached to a Unity Catalog metastore.
Metastore privileges to create credentials and catalogs. You need CREATE STORAGE CREDENTIAL, CREATE EXTERNAL LOCATION, and CREATE_CATALOG on the metastore. If any CLI call in this template returns PERMISSION_DENIED, ask your metastore admin to grant the missing privilege.
An S3 bucket and IAM role in the same AWS account and region as your workspace. The template walks through pointing a storage credential at the IAM role; you must already have permissions in AWS to create the role and policy.