What is Fabric Airlift?

Fabric Airlift is the governed migration factory for Databricks Migration & Modernization — built as a Fabric family vertical. It moves legacy warehouse and ETL estates (Synapse, SQL Server, Snowflake, Teradata, Oracle, and more) to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, and it treats conversion as a pluggable step: governance is the product, and evidence is the moat.

Airlift is deliberately thin where the ecosystem is strong. Databricks Lakebridge is the conversion engine for the deterministic pass; a Fabric Harness agent works the residue. Airlift adds the three things a conversion tool does not give you:

1. The governed funnel — every migration object moves discovered → planned → converting → converted → certified → cutover through Fabric Platform actions with policies, state machines, and an org-scoped event log. There is no side door: console clicks, agent tools, and worker activities share one mutation path.
2. Parity certificates that state their evidence — certification carries a declared evidence depth (row_count → aggregates → sampled_rows → full_checksum), the source/target snapshots, the sample volume, the validation run, and the pinned tool version. A policy blocks certificates below the organization's configured minimum — an overclaiming certificate is worse than none.
3. Gated, reversible cutovers with an attestable trail — a wave cannot execute until every object is certified and the configured distinct approvals are collected; the wave planner can never approve their own wave; rollback is a first-class action; and one governed export assembles the replayable, content-digested evidence pack.

Positioning in the Fabric family

Harness builds the agents. Experiments judges them. Runway ships them. Tower flies the missions. Radar watches everything in the air. Airlift moves legacy estates home. Platform keeps everyone honest.

Airlift is a vertical, not a framework. It composes published contracts and never re-implements them:

• Governed mutations: @fabricorg/platform + @fabricorg/platform-host (createGovernedActionHost)
• Durable cutover execution: a direct @temporalio/workflow domain workflow (family standard; Tower precedent), composed through the Harness worker/connection wrappers
• Conversion: Databricks Lakebridge as workspace jobs, recorded by reference with pinned tool versions
• Parity validation: @fabricorg/databricks-testkit parity suites (DuckDB-local and live workspace)
• Databricks transport: @fabric-harness/databricks

Who it is for

• Enterprises leaving a legacy warehouse who need the cutover call — and the regulator's follow-up questions — backed by evidence rather than a spreadsheet.
• Platform teams running a migration factory across multiple estates and source systems who want one funnel, one certificate schema, and one audit trail.
• Tech Fabric delivery teams packaging Databricks M&M engagements: the assessment is sellable on its own, and the funnel is the pre-sales demo.

Continue with the quickstart, read the method, or go straight to parity certificates — the artifact the whole product hangs off.