Lakebase branching for CI/CD: lessons from 100 PR databases

Snorkel AI replaced ~20-minute Aurora database restores for each PR environment with Databricks Lakebase copy-on-write branches, provisioning a writable production-like database in under 60 seconds. A DMS-replicated main branch stays within about 2 minutes of production Aurora, and each PR branch is created via API, given a TTL, and deleted when the PR closes. The design targets about 100 concurrent PR branches on a ~2.5 TB dataset, with per-branch compute scaling to zero and service principals using short-lived OAuth tokens for CI.