What is Microsoft Fabric? A Guide for the Data Analytics Platform
Most businesses run on data; it is the fuel that powers modern decision-making. However, keeping such a large volume of data organized is a tough task. Sometimes it can get messy, especially since there is no single source of data. Data comes from spreadsheets, software, analytics tools, private repositories, and many more places. Making everything work seamlessly is quite a headache that even veteran data analysts struggle with. This is the exact problem that Microsoft tried to solve with Microsoft Fabric. So, what is Microsoft Fabric?
At its core, Microsoft Fabric is a software as a service that aims to bring all the tools and all the data in those tools together under a single centralized location.
It is not just another collection dump. Think of it as an all-in-one solution that handles all key steps of any data analysis workload. So users can complete everything from collecting the raw data to the presentation of results from a single application.
The main goal of MS Fabric is to enhance organizational abilities to eliminate all the chaos that plagues the current data landscapes. Let us see in more detail what it does to your data to make it universally accessible for anyone and everyone in your organisation.
What is Microsoft Fabric Used For? One Platform, Many Jobs
This tool is best known for its versatility, but what is Microsoft Fabric’s main use case? Or what betterment can an organization expect once it deploys Microsoft Fabric?
Before Fabric, companies had to rely on many different tools. Many of which were incompatible with each other. So most of the time was spent on low or non-productive tasks like moving data from one system to another.
Fabric eliminates all these limitations by forming a single smooth pipeline from start to end. The point below highlights use cases of Fabric in detail.
- OneLake: This is the bottom-most layer holding everything together.
- Data Factory: Fabric makes use of the highly reliable Azure Data Factory channels to get your data from point A to point B. No matter what your source might be (Sales Force, Excel Sheets, Survey Monkey, Google Analytics), even the OneDrive usage report made in the M365 Admin Center can be a data source. You can pull that data, clean it up, and load it into Fabric’s central storage without any code or scripts.
- Data Engineering: Shape and mold the raw data into useful information, structured tables that can be studied and analysed with ease. All without leaving the platform.
- Data Warehousing: Maintain secure digital inventories of all facts and figures. Moreover, gain the ability to use lightning-fast SQL queries.
- Data Science: Easy deployment of ML models on MS Fabric enables sales forecasting and trend analysis at never-before-seen levels.
- Real Time Analytics: Fabric can handle a continuous stream of data from sources like social media feeds and IOT devices. So you respond to events as they are happening.
- Business Intelligence: Fabric is built around Power BI. Use Fabric to create beautiful visualizations and tell real stories to act upon.
What is Microsoft Fabric Good For? Know Its Real World Strengths
Whenever a new platform is introduced, it’s natural for early adopters to have questions like How good is Microsoft Fabric for my organization? Is it worth it? What pain points does it attempt to resolve?
In Microsoft Fabric’s case, the most straightforward answer to all those queries is simplification.
It makes the creation and maintenance of analytics systems super easy. Before, what used to take hours of effort on the part of the data analyst and involved complex stitching of many different incompatible services is now just a matter of clicking a few buttons.
All thanks to Fabric.
Integrations would no longer fail abruptly, you won’t end up having multiple copies of the same dataset, and achieve more by spending less time.
Being a Software-as-a-Service means that it is Microsoft that is responsible for all of the underlying infrastructure that makes Fabric work. So you and your team don’t have to worry about maintaining the hardware or updating the software.
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Instead, your entire focus is on extracting insights from data. Which results in better and faster decisions.
In a typical Fabric use case, a data engineer prepares a dataset, which is instantly made available to the business analyst. They can use the data to build Power BI reports. All without any handoffs or data transfers.
A single copy of your data present in OneLake eliminates the endless cycle of copying and moving data between systems.
Now that we know what Microsoft Fabric is and its biggest advantages, let’s see how long organizations have been using this service.
When Was Microsoft Fabric Released?
When we compare it to other Microsoft products, Fabric is rather new. It was first announced on May 23, 2023, at the Microsoft Build annual conference.
A public preview version was made available, and over 25,000 organisations joined to use the service.
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The General Availability (GA) date was November 15, 2023.
Who Should Use Microsoft Fabric?
Anyone who works with data will find Fabric useful. The best part about fabric is that it is not a niche product, but rather, Microsoft specifically designed it to have a mass audience. This includes:
- Data Engineers
- Data Scientists
- Data Warehouse Managers
- Business Analysts
Why is Microsoft Fabric So Expensive?
Just looking at all the features and facilities of a solution is not enough. If a business is truly committed to adopting a new technology, it must understand the overall cost as well.
At first glance, Fabric appears expensive. This is true if you think of it as a single product. The cost of MS Fabric depends on two components: Fabric capacity (Data Computation) and Fabric OneLake (Data Storage).
Out of the two, Fabric Capacity is responsible for the major chunk of your bill. During your procurement, you buy a shared pool of capacity units that power all the data analysis you do.
This single point purchasing means your bills scale linearly, and you have a predictable billing cycle. Plus, there is the flexibility of either choosing a pay-as-you-go model or joining a one-year commitment. The latter has a higher upfront cost, but it gives you significant savings over the long term.
To understand what Microsoft Fabric pricing is, consider the following:
A pay-as-you-go model in the Central US region starts from the F2 tier. You get 2 CU’s that cost $262.80 per month, and this scales up in multiples of 2. The F8 SKU-level license is $1051.20, and at the F64 SKU (64 CU’s), you need to pay $8,409.60 per month.
On the other hand, a one-year reservation provides a discount of around 41%; for instance, the F64 tier would cost approximately $5,002.67 per month.
Plans go up to the F2048 tier (Two thousand forty-eight Capacity units)
The OneLake Storage is billed separately at approximately $0.023 per GB per month.
All of this sounds like too much, but when you consider the alternative approach where each component, like data integration(Fivetran), warehousing(Snowflake), big data analysis(Databricks), and BI tools(Tableau), all have separate payments, you end up saving money.
Conclusion
Here in this blog, we not only explained to you what Microsoft Fabric is but also took you through its usage, its users, its price, and its purpose. We saw how this single, unified platform completes all the necessary steps, from raw data ingestion to beautiful visualization presentations.
Moreover, you can use MS Fabric to add cluttered information from many different sources, contribute and collaborate with your team, and extract really useful insights. For more such advanced tutorials on Microsoft 365, you can bookmark our blog by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + D.