Building a near real-time application with Zerobus Ingest and Lakebase

Databricks introduces Zerobus Ingest and Lakebase as a simplified stack for building near real-time applications. Zerobus Ingest eliminates the traditional Kafka/Spark multi-hop ingestion pipeline by pushing event data directly into Delta tables with sub-5-second latency and up to 100 MB/sec throughput. Lakebase is a fully managed serverless Postgres database built into Databricks that syncs lakehouse data for low-latency operational workloads. A practical food delivery tracking example walks through the full architecture: a Zerobus SDK client writes GPS telemetry to a Delta table, a continuous sync pipeline (10–15s lag) or ForeachWriter (200–300ms) pushes data to Lakebase, and a FastAPI + WebSocket backend deployed on Databricks Apps serves a real-time dashboard. Code snippets cover table creation, Zerobus stream setup, CDF enablement, and the LakebaseForeachWriter integration.