Non-Human Identities (NHI) and Immutable Infrastructure.

A mature DevOps environment treats Production as a "No-Fly Zone" for human write access. Changes should only happen via authorized pipelines. This concept is called Immutable Infrastructure—once deployed, humans don't tweak it; they redeploy a new version. To enforce this, Identity Access Management (IAM) must distinguish between the "Deployer" (Service Principal) and the "Observer" (Human).

Application: Databricks Job ACLs provide the granularity needed to implement this theory.

Owner = Deployer: The Service Principal running Terraform/DABs holds the Owner role. This ensures that the deployment script never hits a "Permission Denied" error.
Can View = Observer: The Data Engineers get "Glass Wall" access. They can see everything needed to diagnose a failure (Stack traces, metrics, logs) but cannot touch the knobs. This prevents the "It worked when I ran it manually" syndrome and protects the organization from accidental deletions or costly ad-hoc runs. If a human needs to fix a bug, they must fix the code, commit to Git, and let the Service Principal deploy the fix, maintaining a perfect audit trail.

Topic: Security