Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, cloud-based SaaS solution for data and analytics. It’s built on top of an open lakehouse (OneLake) and weaves several Microsoft tools together to streamline all data and analytics workflows, from data integration and engineering to data science.Unlock Your Data’s Potential With Atlan – Start Product Tour

Microsoft launched Fabric at the latest Microsoft Build on May 23, 2023, and made it generally available (GA) for purchase at its Ignite conference on November 15, 2023.

In this article, we’ll explore the architecture and components of Microsoft Fabric, followed by a quick guide to getting started with the tool.

We’ll also address the most common questions that data practitioners have been asking about Microsoft Fabric since its launch, from its pricing to its similarities with other analytics tools.

Microsoft Fabric is a cloud-based SaaS offering that brings together several data and analytics tools that organizations need. These include Data Factory, Data Activator, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI.

Fabric is built on an open, lake-centric design with a central, multi-cloud repository called OneLake.

“It’s the biggest launch of a data product from Microsoft since the launch of the SQL Server.” Satya Nadella, CEO and Chairman of Microsoft at Microsoft Build 2023

Microsoft Fabric supports open data formats (Delta-compatible formats, Trino-based platforms) across all its workloads and tiers.

It caters to technical and business data practitioners and has customers like Accenture, T-Mobile, Ferguson, Zeiss, Ernst and Young, and ABN AMRO.

Updates on Microsoft Fabric from Ignite 2023. - Source: YouTube.

The tool aims to set up a modern data architecture that leverages the principles of data mesh, data fabric, and data hub (an open and governed lakehouse platform).

Before proceeding, let’s understand two elements of Fabric — experiences and workspaces.

Each workload or capability that Microsoft Fabric offers is called an experience.

Experiences include Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, Data Activator, Data Factory, and Power BI.

The seven experiences available in Microsoft Fabric as of November 2023. - Source: Microsoft Fabric documentation.

Microsoft Fabric lets you set up workspaces depending on your workflows and use cases. A workspace is where you can collaborate with others to create reports, notebooks, lakehouses, etc.

Here’s an image that shows what the workspace of a data engineer would look like in Microsoft Fabric.

The Microsoft Fabric workspace for the data engineering persona - Source: Microsoft Fabric documentation.

Next, let’s look at the various components that make up Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric architecture has seven workloads that run on top of OneLake — the storage layer that can pull data from Microsoft’s platforms, Amazon S3, and eventually from Google Cloud Platform.

These workloads include:

Microsoft Fabric architecture and its components - Source: Microsoft Fabric documentation.

OneLake is the central repository for Microsoft Fabric and is a lakehouse architecture. All data is stored in the delta lake format, abandoning relational storage.

Data storage options in Microsoft Fabric and how they all come together in OneLake - Source: Microsoft Fabric documentation.

Since delta lake is open-source, the Fabric architecture is also open. So, you can integrate any product that can read from a delta lake.

OneLake’s data hub is the central unit for finding, exploring, and using the various data assets within Fabric.

A handy feature of OneLake is that you can create shortcuts that point to other data locations, such as ADLS Gen2 or AWS S3. As a result, you don’t have to make multiple copies of your assets.

Also, read → Databricks Lakehouse Platform built on top of the open-source Delta Lake

Since the launch during Build 2023, Microsoft has introduced several capabilities, such as:

Data security and governance for your Fabric data with Microsoft Purview. - Source: Microsoft Blog

What’s new with Microsoft Fabric as of November 2023. - Source: Microsoft Blog.

Microsoft is infusing Fabric with Azure OpenAI Service at every layer so that data practitioners can leverage generative AI to support their daily workflows.

According to Arun Ulagaratchagan, here’s how you can use Copilot within the various Fabric experiences:

Satya Nadella delves into the capabilities of Copilot at Ignite 2023. - Source: YouTube.

Microsoft Fabric is being used to solve data warehousing, integration, real-time analytics, data science and machine learning, and other such requirements.

According to Arun Ulagaratchagan, “25,000 organizations around the world are already using Fabric today, including 67% of the Fortune 500. 84% of these companies are using three or more workloads.”

To get started, choose the relevant experience when you set up Fabric — Power BI, Data Factory, Microsoft Purview, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Data Warehouse, or Synapse Real-Time Analytics.

Depending on the persona you choose, the Fabric workspace will be customized. For example, if you choose Data Engineering, here’s what you’ll see right on top — set up for the Lakehouse, Notebook, or a Spark Job.

Read more → Microsoft Fabric use cases

Let’s look at some of the most common questions people have about Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric is a Software as a Service (SaaS).

It combines existing PaaS services that Microsoft offers (i.e., Synapse, Data Factory, Power BI, etc.) to offer an integrated, end-to-end environment for all types of data users.

Microsoft Fabric is seen as a successor to Azure Synapse Analytics.

Unlike Synapse, which is a PaaS, Fabric is a SaaS. This primarily affects the Fabric architecture and pricing.

How is Microsoft Fabric an evolution over Azure Synapse - Source: Twitter.

There is a lot of overlap between both solutions, in terms of warehousing, data engineering, data science, and real-time analytics capabilities.

This can lead to users trying to understand the differences in functionalities.

However, it’s important to note that while Synapse focused on warehousing, Fabric aims to be a single platform for all data users and their daily workflows.

Read more → Microsoft Fabric vs. Azure Synapse Analytics

So, in addition to almost everything Synapse offers, Fabric streamlines the user experience further with single storage for all data types (with a lakehouse) and Power BI for its user interface.

According to Bogdan Crivat, Partner Director of Engineering at Microsoft, the company is "investing significant development efforts in migration processes and tooling. And our migration efforts are prioritizing current PaaS Synapse Analytics customers.”

Microsoft is working on developing tools to help you migrate code, reuse notebooks and pipelines, etc. However, there’s no automatic upgrade path for your existing Synapse workloads. You’ll have to manually migrate them by adjusting the notebooks, SQL scripts, pipelines, etc.

It’s also important to note that Microsoft Fabric doesn’t support several T-SQL commands. This can affect some of the warehouse-related migrations. Here’s a complete list of commands that Fabric doesn’t support yet.

As of November 2023, Microsoft has no plans to retire Azure Synapse Analytics.

Databricks is offering a unified data analytics platform that combines the best aspects of a data warehouse and a data lake. The platform components include Delta Lake (storage), Runtime (processing), Workspace (the collaboration layer), Machine Learning, and SQL Analytics (BI).

Snowflake is a cloud-native data warehouse that supports different types of workloads via its Data Cloud.

Microsoft Fabric aims to bring everything for the various data practitioners under one roof — data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time processing, analytics, and BI.

For instance, its OneLake is like your “OneDrive for data”. And the UI is built using Power BI, rather than Synapse Studio, to focus on delivering better user experiences.

As of now, Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS cloud-based offering.

Microsoft Fabric’s pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $0.36/hour for 2 Capacity Units (CU). You can also reserve capacity, starting at $0.215/hour for 2 CUs.

Meanwhile, the pricing for OneLake storage starts at $0.023 per GB per month. The Networking billing details aren’t out yet.

A capacity is the ability of a resource to either perform an activity or to produce output. Capacity Units (CUs) will define this ability, representing a set of resources that you can use at any given time.

How pricing with work in terms of Capacity Units (CU) - Source: Microsoft.