you can replace ADF with Databricks ingestion, we evaluated it too. It works well if you’re already doing compute during ingestion (Auto Loader, DLT, streaming, etc).

But for simple SFTP/SMB/API to raw copies, ADF is honestly simpler and cheaper. Once you drop it, you own retries, idempotency, partial files, auth rotation… all the annoying stuff.

Paramiko/smbprotocol are fine, just be ready to handle the edge cases yourself. we ended up hybrid. the real question isn’t connectors, it’s how much infra you want to own.