Decoding Microsoft Fabric: An Introduction to Its Key Terminologies
FABRIC SERIES: FUNDAMENTALS 02 — INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT FABRIC LINGOS
✐ Co-Author — Mihyun Ellie Kim
❑ Overview
In our last blog “The Core and Essence of Microsoft Fabric", we went through different aspects of Microsoft fabric platform with primary focus on What & Why Fabric. In this blog we will go through various Fabric core concepts & lingos.
❑ Tenant
Before we start with Fabric Tenant lets understand an organization, subscriptions & Tenant.
An organization represents a business entity that is using Microsoft cloud offerings, typically identified by one or more public Domain Name System (DNS) domain names, such as contoso.com.
A subscription is an agreement with Microsoft to use one or more Microsoft cloud platforms or services, for which charges accrue based on either a per-user license fee or on cloud-based resource consumption.
- Microsoft’s Software as a Service (SaaS)-based cloud offerings (Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365) charge per-user license fees.
- Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offerings (Azure) charge based on cloud resource consumption.
What is Tenant in Fabric?
Tenant is the most fundamental part of the structure of Fabric. A tenant is a single instance of Fabric for an organization and is aligned with a Microsoft Entra ID. A Fabric tenant is associated with an Entra ID formerly Azure Active Directory (AAD) tenant, which is a directory service that the organizations own when they sign up for a Microsoft cloud service such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Power BI, etc.
Can we have multiple Fabric instance for an organization?
Yes, Many Microsoft customers prefer to manage their user accounts and software access through a single tenant, offering a streamlined approach to centralized management. Yet, there are instances where employing multiple tenants is advantageous, especially when different business units or government sections need a higher degree of separation to prevent unauthorized access to information or systems beyond their designated area. For organizations operating with multiple tenants, activating Microsoft Fabric across the entire organization necessitates enabling it individually within each tenant.
You also have an option to enable Microsoft Fabric for specific users. You can either specify the security groups that Microsoft Fabric will be enabled for, or the security groups that Microsoft Fabric won’t be available for.
What are the roles needed to enable Microsoft Fabric?
- Microsoft 365 Global admin
- Power Platform admin
- Fabric admin
❑ Capacity
A Microsoft Fabric capacity resides on a tenant. Each capacity that sits under a specific tenant is a distinct pool of resources allocated to Microsoft Fabric. Capacities are the foundation for simplicity and flexibility of Fabric’s licensing model. You can get a shared pool of capacity that powers all capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, from data modeling and data warehousing to business intelligence and AI experiences (one minute minimum).
Each capacity has its own number of Capacity Units (CU). Capacity units (CUs) are units of measure representing a pool of compute power. Compute power is required to run all queries, jobs, or tasks in Fabric.
Capacities can be acquired in three ways — the Fabric trial, Power BI Premium capacities, and Fabric capacities.
If I have existing Power BI Premium P-SKUs, should I buy Fabric capacity?
Fabric capacities and Power BI Premium capacities offer two purchasing options for you to get access to the complete range of Microsoft Fabric capabilities. All Power BI Premium capacities are automatically upgraded to support all the Fabric workloads.
However, if you need additional capacity, you can purchase Fabric capacities which are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning you can scale them up and down dynamically and even pause them completely with no usage commitment.
You can save money with Fabric capacity reservation by committing to a reservation for your Fabric capacity usage for a duration of one year.
What should be my capacities purchasing strategy?
Below are different strategies for purchasing Fabric capacity.
Note — We will have a separate blog for fabric license.
❑ Workspace
A fabric Workspaces reside within capacities and are used as containers for Microsoft Fabric items. Each Microsoft Fabric user has a personal workspace known as My Workspace. Workspaces are places to collaborate with colleagues to create collections of items such as lakehouses, warehouses, and reports.
Below are some of the key things that can be done with Workspace.
- Use granular workspace roles for flexible permissions management in the workspaces: Admin, Member, Contributor, and Viewer. Read more about workspace roles.
- Workspace settings: As workspace admin, you can update and manage your workspace configurations in workspace settings.
- Manage a workspace in Git: Git integration in Microsoft Fabric enables Pro developers to integrate their development processes, tools, and best practices straight into the Fabric platform. Learn how to manage a workspace with Git.
Each user/group in Fabric workspace has either an Admin, Member, Contributor or a Viewer role. Please find below the capability of a user/group based on assigned role.
❑ Domain
A Fabric domain is a logical grouping of Fabric workspaces. They present a convenient way to manage access and permissions to groups of resources. For example, you can have a Domain for Sales and another for Marketing.
Domains act as representations of distinct business data segments. When a specific area of the business requires ownership over its data entities and the processes that surround them, establishing a Domain becomes a practical solution. Within each Domain, workspaces can be thoughtfully designed to cater to the varying access needs of data analysts and developers concerning Fabric items.
Microsoft recommends organizing data using separate Domains for each department (e.g., Sales, Finance, IT) in a Data Mesh architecture, where departments have ownership and responsibility of their data in a decentralized manner. All workspaces related to a specific department can be grouped under the same Domain.
❑ Items
A Fabric item is an object that can be created and managed in Fabric. Each item type provides different capabilities. For example, the Data Engineering experience includes the lakehouse, notebook, and Spark job definition items.
Below figure brings together all the concepts discussed in above sections.
I hope this blog helped you in understanding the core concepts & fabric lingos. There is still more to come…Happy Learning!!!
Please Note — All opinions expressed here are my personal views and not of my employer.
Thought of the moment-
“If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.” — APJ Abdul Kalam
