Microsoft Fabric, a transformative solution that offers a suite of tools to simplify data analysis, integration, and archiving. This article provides an in-depth look at Microsoft Fabric, highlighting its core capabilities, workloads, and pricing structure. Let's discover together some Microsoft Fabric business cases, such as the democratization of access to data, in the reduction of costs and in the improvement of organizational efficiency. Finally, let's see how Microsoft Fabric revolutionizes data management and analysis strategies in the era of artificial intelligence, allowing us to unlock the potential of business data.
Microsoft Fabric is a revolutionary platform from Microsoft designed to unify a series of data analysis tools. This innovative system combines several existing Azure tools with new capabilities, creating a single, simplified environment for processing data and generating insights. Think of it as a multifunctional center for analyzing data and extracting valuable information.
The goal of Microsoft Fabric is to allow business data to be fully used in the era of AI, making analysis accessible to all users, not just data science specialists.
Designed for both businesses and individual professionals, Microsoft Fabric serves as a versatile analysis platform. It includes everything from real-time analysis and data science to data storage and migration. Combining a variety of tools and technologies, it offers an integrated and seamless solution for data management.
Microsoft Fabric is designed with simplicity at its core. It allows organizations to integrate data from different sources into a single, cohesive environment. This simplified setup allows data professionals to focus on results rather than getting lost in technology. It also eliminates the hassle for data teams to manage licensing interactions between Synapse, Azure Data Factory, and Power BI.
Microsoft Fabric is a cloud-based SaaS solution that brings together a variety of essential data and analysis tools for organizations. It includes Data Factory, Data Activator, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI in a single comprehensive package.
Fabric operates on an open, data lake centric model with a central multi-cloud repository called OneLake. Its goal is to create a modern data architecture that integrates data mesh, data fabric and data hub principles, forming an open and governed lakehouse platform.
To better understand Microsoft Fabric, it's important to consider two fundamental aspects: experiences and workspaces.
In Microsoft Fabric, the various features are referred to as “experiences.” These include a range of tools and capabilities, including Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, Data Activator, Data Factory and Power BI.
With Microsoft Fabric, you can create custom workspaces to fit your workflows and needs. These workspaces provide a collaborative space for developing reports, notebooks, lakehouses, and other items with your team.
The Microsoft Fabric architecture involves seven workloads that operate on top of OneLake, the storage layer that can pull data from Microsoft platforms, from Amazon S3 and, in the future, from Google Cloud Platform.
Let's take a look at what these workloads include.
Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric offers cloud-scale data movement and transformation services that solve the most complex data factory and ETL (extract, transform, load) scenarios. This solution allows organizations to integrate data from different sources with ease, combining the intuitive interface of Power Query with the vast scalability and power of Data Factory. It facilitates fluid access to a wide range of data environments, improving value extraction.
Within Microsoft Fabric, Data Factory provides the tools to develop data pipelines directly on the platform. This comprehensive suite of integration features allows you to efficiently initiate and manage data transfer tasks, moving them from their sources to desired destinations.
Data Factory has extensive connectivity capabilities, allowing integration with more than 170 different data stores. This includes cloud-based databases, on-premises sources, analytics platforms, and a wide range of other data systems.
Integrated with artificial intelligence, Data Factory offers capabilities similar to those found in the Microsoft 365 suite. This AI integration is designed to accelerate and automate standard tasks, facilitating more efficient and streamlined workflows.
With next-generation Power BI dataflows, you have immediate access to more than 300 data transformation options, including AI-driven transformations and scalable data streams, right from the start.
As a core element of Microsoft Fabric, Synapse Data Engineering facilitates collaboration between data professionals on different projects. It covers a wide spectrum of functions, such as data warehousing, data integration, business intelligence, and data science.
Synapse Data Engineering's key features include a sophisticated lakehouse architecture that combines the advantages of data lakes and data warehouses. This configuration simplifies the processes of ingesting, transforming, and sharing data. In addition, it takes advantage of the capabilities of Apache Spark to handle large scale data transformations and create a robust lakehouse framework.
Spark engine and high-performance runtime: Synapse Data's design provides customers with a Spark runtime optimized with the latest versions of Spark, Delta, and Python. By default, Spark Runtime is preconfigured in every workspace, so users don't need to make any additional adjustments.
The notebooks in Synapse Data Engineering are designed to provide an improved development experience. They support various tools, programming languages and libraries, integrating directly with the lakehouse infrastructure. In addition, these notebooks facilitate collaborative work and integrate easily with Spark, VS Code, and other systems.
Synapse Data Engineering already includes a number of features, and Microsoft plans to significantly expand its offerings in the near future. Among the planned additions, we highlight new features for advanced lakehouse security.
Synapse Data Warehouse integrates advanced data warehousing capabilities into Microsoft Fabric. Its native support for an open data format facilitates effortless collaboration between data engineers, IT professionals, and business users, while maintaining strict business security standards.
Synapse Data Warehouse introduces several improvements over previous generations of data warehouses, including a fully managed SaaS solution. This new generation is suitable for both users with no coding experience and those who prefer to write code, offering functionality tailored to a range of technical skills.
In Synapse Data Warehouse, data is not limited to a proprietary SQL Server format. It uses an open data standard and ensures compatibility with the Spark ecosystem, promoting greater interoperability.
Support for the open data standard in Synapse Data Warehouse allows for cross-query capabilities. As a result, the data stored in the data warehouse can be accessed and merged with other datasets within Microsoft Fabric or through different calculation engines.
The data warehouse is able to automatically manage its resources, expanding them as usage increases and scaling them down when they are no longer needed, all without requiring user intervention.
With Synapse Data Science, data scientists can use data that has already been securely prepared by data engineering teams, avoiding the need to duplicate data or face complex access procedures.
In addition, users can explore a variety of functionality, including machine learning tools, low-code platforms, and collaborative coding environments through Notebooks and Visual Studio Code.
Data Wrangler is a key feature of Synapse Data Science, designed to improve data preparation. This powerful tool simplifies the process of cleaning and preparing data by integrating seamlessly with Python libraries such as Pandas. Future improvements will introduce support for natural language processing using Azure OpenAI.
Synapse Data Science in Microsoft Fabric provides integrated machine learning tools and supports both MLFlow and the Synapse ML library. Depending on your configuration, your data team can use these capabilities to experiment with machine learning models, monitor crucial metrics, and improve models to extract valuable insights from data.
Synapse Data Science not only supports Python for writing code, but it also offers native support for the R language on Apache Spark.
Synapse Real-Time Analytics simplifies data integration for large organizations, facilitating the rapid retrieval of information. This is done by automating data streaming, indexing, and partitioning, and automatically generating visualizations and queries.
With the ability to manage data in any format and from any source without the need for complex scripts or data models, Real-Time Analytics offers seamless data ingestion. Its scalability is virtually limitless, supporting data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes and efficiently managing multiple concurrent users and queries. This makes it an optimal choice for organizations that manage large scale, high-speed data flows.
It works smoothly with all parts of Microsoft Fabric, including Power BI, Lakehouse, and Data Warehouse. One of its distinctive features is the instant generation of Power BI reports, which allows users to produce reports with a single click.
By storing your data in Microsoft OneLake, it is directly integrated with all other components of Microsoft Fabric, ensuring that only a logical copy of the data is used.
It supports real-time streaming and the transformation of complex data structures, allowing queries to be executed only a few seconds after ingesting the data.
Offering a wide range of data analysis services, Synapse Real-Time Analytics also simplifies the integration process with other components of Microsoft Fabric.
For organizations that aspire to excel in a data-driven landscape, this service is valuable. It can integrate and analyze data from multiple sources and scale effortlessly to manage huge amounts of information.
We have created the Infrastructure & Security team, focused on the Azure cloud, to better respond to the needs of our customers who involve us in technical and strategic decisions. In addition to configuring and managing the tenant, we also take care of:
With Dev4Side, you have a reliable partner that supports you across the entire Microsoft application ecosystem.
Microsoft refers to OneLake as the “OneDrive for Data,” because it works like a multi-cloud data lake, allowing organizations to store their data in a similar way to how OneDrive is used to manage documents.
This solution offers several key features: a scalable and unified data asset to meet the organization's growing needs; a single copy of the data that can be used by multiple analytics engines within Microsoft Fabric (including T-SQL, Spark, and others); and a universal security framework that ensures that security settings are defined only once and applied uniformly across all analytical platforms.
OneLake acts as Microsoft's centralized data platform, facilitating team-based data management. Collaboration is seamlessly integrated, and each Microsoft Fabric tenant automatically receives a unique instance of OneLake to store all organizational data, without the need for additional configurations.
Integrated directly into Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Desktop, OneLake provides a centralized solution for all your data needs. It helps eliminate data silos and ensures that the necessary data is easily and quickly accessible in any context.
With OneLake workspaces, multiple teams can operate autonomously within the same data lake. Each workspace can be managed with its own administrative settings and access controls.
OneLake facilitates a logical and efficient organization of data, allowing different business groups to manage and oversee their data. For example, you can implement a data mesh to outline different business domains, including sales, human resources, marketing, and e-commerce. Each domain will host its own specific data, such as engagement metrics, site statistics, and personalized content, allowing for optimized data usage and providing administrators with more precise control.
Based on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, OneLake supports all types of files. Data from the various components of Microsoft Fabric, including Power BI, lakehouse, and warehouse, is automatically stored in OneLake.
The OneLake file explorer app allows direct access to OneLake from Windows. By integrating OneLake and Data Lake for Microsoft Fabric into your Windows File Explorer, this app simplifies data storage and ensures that the data is readily accessible to users without technical skills.
Microsoft Fabric has been defined by the manufacturer itself as being a step ahead of other similar products on the market. The reasons consist of five functionalities.
Let's discover them together below.
Analytics projects are based on multiple support systems, each with their own requirements and often requiring input from different vendors. Integrating these different products can be a challenge, subject to fragility and costly.
Microsoft Fabric alleviates this problem by offering teams a single solution that provides a consistent user interface, a cohesive architecture, and a variety of other tools needed to extract and present insights from data.
Data lakes can be chaotic and complex, making them extremely difficult to build, integrate, and manage. Once operational, problems such as data duplication and vendor lock-in can arise, often due to the use of multiple data products with proprietary formats within the same data lake.
Microsoft Fabric addresses these issues with OneLake, an integrated SaaS multi-cloud data lake. Just as Microsoft 365 applications integrate seamlessly with OneDrive, all workloads within Fabric are automatically linked to OneLake.
OneLake's integrated integration eliminates common, fragmented data silos that often result from team members creating isolated storage accounts. By providing a single, unified storage solution, OneLake makes it easy to discover and share data across the entire team.
In Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Copilot's AI is integrated at all levels, improving the ability of users to maximize the value of their data. This integration makes it easier for developers to apply generative AI to customer data and supports business users in finding actionable insights.
With Copilot integrated into every data experience within Microsoft Fabric, users can take advantage of conversational language to:
To cultivate a culture based on data, organizations aim to empower everyone to make informed decisions using data. Microsoft Fabric supports this goal by ensuring that the analysis is accessible to all team members. Fabric is deeply integrated with standard Microsoft 365 applications, allowing these tools to become central hubs for discovering and applying insights. This integration transforms Microsoft 365 applications into key platforms for exploiting insights from data.
Combining products from different suppliers in a single project often leads to significant inefficiencies. This is mainly because computing resources are distributed across various systems, such as data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence, resulting in significant waste. When one of these systems is down, its capacity remains unused by other systems, leading to wasted resources.
Microsoft Fabric addresses this issue by simplifying the process of acquiring and managing resources. It allows the purchase of a single computing reserve to support all workloads, such as data integration and data science. This consolidated approach significantly reduces costs, as any computing power not used in one workload can be allocated to others.
Microsoft has made a significant investment in creating Microsoft Fabric as their new flagship tool for next-generation data and AI. It is important, as a company, to examine whether to invest in this product and what benefits it brings to the organization.
Here's an overview of case studies for Microsoft Fabric.
High-profile data breaches have demonstrated serious consequences for businesses, including reputational damage, loss of critical intellectual property, compromised customer and employee security, and potentially heavy fines
By providing a single source of truth in the data lake, Microsoft Fabric reduces data duplication and avoids the need to transfer data between different locations. This strategy is designed to consolidate data within a secure environment such as 'Active Directory', thus reducing business risks and simplifying data management.
Microsoft Fabric integrates all your data within Microsoft Entra for access controls, Microsoft Purview, and the full suite of essential security measures to protect against both minor and major data breaches.
Microsoft Fabric ensures that all your data is managed within the Microsoft Entra framework for access control, Microsoft Purview, and a comprehensive set of security protocols designed to prevent data breaches of any scale, from minor to catastrophic.
Democratizing data makes information more accessible to everyone within your organization, and much of Fabric's design is focused on this goal.
Democratizing data improves accessibility within the organization, but requires strict controls to manage data use and prevent unauthorized access. Microsoft Fabric's extensive access control mechanisms are crucial for maintaining data security and preventing data leaks, ensuring that democratization doesn't compromise data integrity or confidentiality.
You can also designate and publish only valid data, ensuring that end users have access to reliable and validated information from the start.
The real benefit of democratizing data is that it allows people within your organization to access the right information. This allows them to generate valuable insights, make more informed decisions, and perform their tasks more effectively.
One of the most common questions is what the price is and if Microsoft Fabric is Free. To determine your capacity needs, start by starting a trial and configuring some of your workloads. Monitor these through the Fabric Capacity Metrics report, which will provide guidance on the capacity you'll need once your trial period ends. The latter is Microsoft Fabric Free's only option.
The costs of Microsoft Fabric are affected by several key elements. These include individual licenses for Power BI, OneLake storage, and capacities. The first two components, licenses and storage, are relatively easy to calculate, so we'll start with these.
When it comes to using traditional Power BI capabilities, such as generating and accessing reports and dashboards, the need for a Power BI Pro license varies. This requirement remains consistent even with Microsoft Fabric. Users with M365 E5 licenses have automatically included the Power BI Pro license, eliminating the need for additional licenses. Conversely, if you don't have E5 licenses, every user, both developer and consumer, will need a Power BI Pro license, unless you have acquired Premium capacity at level F64/P1 or higher.
When Premium capacity is acquired, consumers are not required to own a Pro license, but developers must still have one. On the other hand, if you choose the Premium Per User (PPU) model instead of the dedicated Premium capacity, everyone, including developers and consumers, will need a PPU license to access content within workspaces configured for PPU.
The Premium Per User (PPU) option offers the most cost-effective way to access Premium Power BI capabilities without the need for dedicated capacity; however, it excludes other Microsoft Fabric workloads. For Fabric operations not related to Power BI, no individual user license is required.
In general, the expenses for archiving are much lower than the computing costs. In the US West 2 region, the cost is $0.023 per GB per month, which is equivalent to $23 per TB per month. Also, be aware of the possible costs associated with data transfers between regions, as these can lead to unexpected expenses.
In addition, OneLake charges a fee for cache storage, which includes the KQL cache and the data held by Data Activator, set at $0.26 per GB per month. Additionally, archiving for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR), which can be optionally turned on or off, is charged at $0.0414 per GB per month.
The most complex element of licensing Microsoft Fabric is evaluating the capacity needed and determining how much capacity will be required. Alla dedicated page on the Microsoft site, you can analyze the updated table with the current prices for dedicated Microsoft Fabric capabilities, together with their equivalents in Power BI Premium. It's important to note that Reserved Instances (RIs) offer a significant discount, about 41% less than pay-as-you-go rates, but require an annual commitment.
The capabilities of Microsoft Fabric offer a significant advantage over the dedicated capabilities of Power BI Premium thanks to the pay-as-you-go pricing model. In contrast, Power BI Premium was limited to a fixed monthly rate without the option of variable usage-based payments.
Fabric's pay-as-you-go system allows you to scale your use up or down and pause when necessary, offering better control over both usage and costs. However, this flexibility also introduces additional complexity in deciding what to buy.
Microsoft is moving from Power BI Premium capacity SKUs (P-SKUs) to the new Microsoft Fabric model, with the phasing out of existing SKUs that will take place gradually. The specific timing for this change will be affected by your existing contract. Ultimately, Fabric's capabilities will be the only option available for both purchase and renewal.
The update concerns only the Power BI cloud-based service. Power BI Report Server will continue to be available only through SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance. In the meantime, Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) will not be affected by this change.
Microsoft Fabric represents a revolutionary step forward in the field of data analysis and integration. By unifying various tools into a single platform, it simplifies the complexities of data management, making sophisticated analysis more accessible to a wide range of users.
The wide range of features, the innovative OneLake storage system, and the smooth integration with other Microsoft products are specifically designed to allow businesses to take full advantage of their data management capabilities.
With a focus on democratizing access to data, reducing operating costs and improving efficiency, Microsoft Fabric is positioned as an indispensable tool for organizations seeking to succeed in a world focused on data. As detailed in this article, the platform effectively bridges the gap between data science and everyday business operations, providing a scalable, secure, and easy-to-use environment for data professionals.
Microsoft Fabric is a cloud-based SaaS platform designed to unify data analysis tools, allowing businesses to manage, analyze, and derive insights from their data within a single environment.
Microsoft Fabric uses AI, including Microsoft Copilot, to enhance data analysis, streamline tasks, and create machine learning models.
OneLake is Microsoft Fabric's centralized data lake that stores, organizes, and secures data across multiple cloud environments.
Microsoft Fabric supports various workloads, including Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Warehouse, and Synapse Real-Time Analytics.
Pricing includes Power BI licenses, OneLake storage fees, and capacity costs, with options for pay-as-you-go models or Reserved Instances.
The Infra & Security team focuses on the management and evolution of our customers' Microsoft Azure tenants. Besides configuring and managing these tenants, the team is responsible for creating application deployments through DevOps pipelines. It also monitors and manages all security aspects of the tenants and supports Security Operations Centers (SOC).
