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Erik started his software licensing career in 2005 as a senior procurement officer at the Dutch TAX Office, followed by a large global LSP and Microsoft.
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Microsoft Fabric – ev... Microsoft Fabric – everything you need to know
Author:
Erik Hollander
UPDATE 2025! Choosing the Right Microsoft Fabric SKU – Now Made Easier
Selecting the right Microsoft Fabric SKU has long been a challenge for many organizations — especially as workloads grow more complex and licensing options evolve. With the shift away from Power BI Premium capacity in new agreements, customers are now required to adopt Microsoft Fabric SKUs, often at a significantly higher cost. This transition is especially relevant during contract renewals, where organizations need to reassess their capacity needs and budget accordingly.
Fabric Capacity Estimator
To support this transition, Microsoft has introduced the Fabric Capacity Estimator (currently in public preview). This tool helps organizations estimate the most suitable SKU for their specific workloads, making it easier to justify investments and plan for growth. It enables users to simulate different scenarios and gain clarity on expected usage patterns — helping to avoid over- or under-provisioning.
For organizations navigating the move from Power BI Premium to Fabric, the Capacity Estimator can be a valuable resource to control costs and ensure a smooth transition. While Microsoft Fabric SKUs may still be more expensive, using the right estimator can help reserve the appropriate capacity and minimize unnecessary overspend.
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric, launched in May 2023 in free preview mode, is an all-in-one, cloud-based analytics platform for enterprises that covers everything from data science to data movement.
It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, data integration, real-time analytics and business intelligence. All of these services are integrated into a single platform, making it easy for users to get started and manage their data analytics workloads.
Why use Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric offers a number of benefits to enterprises, including:
- Services offered cover the whole data analytics lifecycle, from data movement to data science. This eliminates the need for enterprises to stitch together different tools and services, saving them time and money.
- All services are integrated into a single platform. This makes it easy for users to manage their data analytics workloads and access all their data from one place.
- Robust data security and governance features, helping enterprises to protect their data and comply with regulations.
- Scalable and performant platform ideal for organizations who deal with large volumes of data
How can you use MS Fabric?
Fabric can be used for a variety of data analytics workloads, including:
- Data lake management helps enterprises to build and manage data lakes, which are centralized repositories for storing and managing large amounts of data.
- Data engineering in Fabric provides tools and services for data engineers to clean, transform, and load data into data lakes and other data stores.
- Fabric helps organizations integrate data from different sources, including on-prem databases, cloud-based apps and IoT devices.
- Real-time analytics enables data analysis as it is being generated.
- Business intelligence supports visualization and analysis of data to make better business decisions.
For more information on MS Fabric and how it works, please visit the Microsoft website.
How to purchase Microsoft Fabric?
Since October 2023, Microsoft customers can purchase Microsoft Fabric via Azure, with costs billed per second without commitment. Microsoft has announced that in the future, Fabric will also be available through Microsoft 365 (M365), where it will be billed monthly or annually with a monthly commitment. However, the exact date for this availability via M365 is not yet known.
Currently, Microsoft Fabric is fully available for purchase through the Azure portal. Customers can access the platform in the following ways:
- Power BI Premium: Use Fabric as part of your Power BI Premium subscription by turning on the Fabric Preview switch.
- Start a trial: In some cases, you may start a trial, but this may not be available to everyone. Check here to see if it is available for you.
- Purchase via Azure: Since October 1, 2023, it has been possible to purchase Microsoft Fabric via the Azure portal. Customers who signed up before this date will have a grace period before they need to start paying (how long this lasts is not yet known).
Purchasing via Azure is likely to be the most popular way to use Microsoft Fabric. In this option, capacities are divided into Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), with each SKU offering a certain amount of compute power measured in Capacity Units (CU). Refer to the Capacity and SKUs table to see how many CUs each SKU provides.
Azure capacity
A customer can use their Azure capacity as long as needed without any commitment. Pricing is set regionally and billing is done on a per-second basis with a minimum of one minute.
Azure capacities offer the following improvements over the Microsoft 365 SKUs:
- Pay as you go with no time commitment
- You can scale your capacity up or down using the Azure portal
- You can pause and resume your capacity as needed. This feature is designed to save money when the capacity isn’t in use
- Microsoft Cost Management
- Azure Monitor Metrics
How to buy Azure SKU for Microsoft Fabric
To buy an Azure SKU for Microsoft Fabric, you need to be an owner or a contributor of an Azure subscription. To do this,
- Select the Microsoft Fabric (preview) service from the Azure portal.
- Select “Create Fabric Capacity” and fill in the required fields such as Subscription, Resource group, Capacity name, Region, Size, and Admin.
M365 SKU
The Microsoft 365 SKUs are known as P SKUs or Power BI SKUs. They also support Fabric if you enable Fabric on top of your Power BI subscription. The PowerBI embedded SKUs don’t support Microsoft Fabric.
Experiences in MS Fabric
Microsoft Fabric offers a comprehensive set of analytics experiences designed to work together seamlessly. Each experience is tailored to a specific persona and a specific task.
Fabric includes industry-leading cloud-based experiences in the following categories for an end-to-end analytical need:
- Synapse Data Warehouse enables you to store and manage large amounts of relational data.
- Synapse Data Engineering helps you build scalable, high-performance big data pipelines.
- Data Factory lets you create, schedule, and orchestrate data integration workflows at scale.
- Synapse Data Science provides a collaborative environment for building, training, and deploying machine learning models at scale.
- Power BI provides interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics enables you to build real-time analytics solutions using Apache Spark and Apache Kafka.
OneLake in Fabric
OneLake is basically the OneDrive of data. It is a single, logical, unified data lake for your entire organization. OneLake is automatically provided with every Microsoft Fabric tenant and is meant to be the one-stop-place for all your analytics data.
In OneLake, shortcuts are embedded references that direct to other file store locations. This creates a way to connect to existing data without having to copy it directly.
Besides being a single data lake for a whole organization, OneLake promises to provide customers with one copy of data for use with multiple analytical engines. It is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and can support any type of file – structured or unstructured. All data items in Fabric, such as data warehouses and lakehouses, automatically store their data in OneLake.