Microsoft Fabric — A different Posture! — Part 1
Azure’s data analytics approach is drifting from PaaS to SaaS: In a two-minute reading, what is this about? and what challenges does this offering resolve?
Over the last decade, Microsoft has invested in several unique PaaS offerings for data analytics, but unfortunately, they have not shared the same experience. This led to integration challenges, huge cognitive loads for data teams, and high data governance and security costs. Thus, Microsoft’s idea of a simple solution — a SaaS offering that has it all — just like Microsoft 365 — is unexpected for data analytics, but it is true and stunning!
Microsoft Fabric is the SaaS offering we are talking about today. It is the single pane of glass for a wide platform that focuses on only one experience, one storage, and one billing model for an end-to-end data analytics solution, yet with a diverse range of data services harnessing the power of organizations’ data.
Do not confuse Microsoft Fabric (Data Analytics) with Azure Service Fabric (microservices — related)! A big thanks to Microsoft for such confusing naming!!
Known challenges
Today’s Azure Data Analytics portfolio relies on several and a complete set of Azure PaaS services that each cover a piece of it. Still, having a working set is usually painful as it requires a massive effort to handle and manage all data warehouses and data lakes while enforcing the best security/compliance practices and integrations for every platform. And as you would imagine, that’s a huge problem!
We usually end up with silos and unavoidable transformations of data!
And this is where Microsoft Fabric comes into play!
Microsoft Fabric – A new generation!
Microsoft Fabric could be thought of as the 3rd generation of Microsoft Data Platforms where:
- The 1st generation contains but is not limited to, ‘HD Insights’ and ‘SQL Data Warehouse’, all relatively isolated technologies of traditional data products.
- The 2nd gen was Synapse, which integrated Platforms at the UX level but still felt slightly disjointed at the data level.
- And now we have the 3rd gen, Microsoft Fabric, which builds on the Synapse unification vision but concentrates primarily on enabling deep data-level interoperability.
The noteworthy shift with Microsoft Fabric is SaaS rather than PaaS. This carries a more opinionated view on how modern data platforms should take shape and enables a further shift toward data democratization.
Microsoft Fabric, at a high level, is one SaaS per EntraID tenant, which entitles a single OneLake to manage the storage for all data and a single point to process, govern, and secure this data. Fabric also tries to reduce costly data copies, which usually and quickly leads to a drift in those data.
Conclusion
Microsoft drastically reduced its efforts to update/maintain the Azure Synapse analytics platform and encouraged its customers to move to Fabric, just as they did with Synapse! (What could be the next surprise?)
Is this new SaaS offering the right approach to reduce the pain of PaaS integration efforts?
Please do not hesitate to share your valuable feedback and experience.
