Fabric Capacities: Divide and Conquer

Fabric Capacities – Divide & Conquer Who am I? Sam Debruyn 📍 Heist-op-den-Berg, BE 💼 Consultant / Cloud & Data Platform Architect 5⃣ years in data 🔟 years in software / architecture / cloud 🫶 Fabric, Azure, modern data platform What we'll talk about Intro Why multiple Workspaces Capacities Throttling Avoiding throttling Conclusion Fabric concepts: Workspaces & Capacities Capacity • pool of Capacity Units • matches a certain amount of compute power • to be spread amongst one or more Workspaces Workspace • logical grouping of items • Lakehouses, Warehouses, Reports, KQL, … • possible access control boundary Setting the stage… Fabric medallion architecture example The 3 Layers of the Medallion Architecture The 3 Layers of the Medallion Architecture The 3 Layers of the Medallion Architecture Curated/gold Purpose : high-quality data supporting business reporting, advanced analytics. Pre-aggregated and tailored to analytical needs. Overview Overview: entire platform (example) Did I invent this? No, this is also how Microsoft recommends it Workspaces & Capacities Why should you create separate Workspaces? Workspace Configuration Workspace Configuration Workspace Configuration Workspace Configuration Workspace Configuration Why should you create separate Workspaces? What is a Fabric Capacity? Fabric Capacities replace… POWER BI PREMIUM PER CAPACITY POWER BI EMBEDDED CAPACITY AZURE DATA FACTORY CONSUMPTION AZURE SYNAPSE SERVERLESS CONSUMPTION AZURE SYNAPSE PIPELINES CONSUMPTION AZURE SYNAPSE DWU COST AZURE SQL DATABASE VCORE CONSUMPTION AZURE ML CONSUMPTION AZURE AI CONSUMPTION Fabric business model overview Microsoft Fabric COMPUTE STORAGE Unified data foundation OneLake Data Factory Data Engineering Data Warehouse Data Science Power BI Real-Time Intelligence Databases Industry Solutions Partner Solutions Copilot in Fabric Capacities Capacity SKUs Bursting & smoothing Example background Example interactive Bursting & smoothing SKU CU’s Available CUs for interactive 10min workloads Available CUs for background 24h workloads Actual workload duration F2 2 1.200 172.800 ASAP* F4 4 2.400 345.600 ASAP* F8 8 4.800 691.200 ASAP* F16 16 9.600 1.382.400 ASAP* F32 32 19.200 2.764.800 ASAP* F64 64 38.400 5.529.600 ASAP* F128 128 76.800 11.059.200 ASAP* … … … … … CU’s = Capacity Units CUs = Capacity Unit seconds Bursting & smoothing Impact of SKU choice Common misconception supported regions Capacity level settings Bursting & smoothing Throttling How to think of a Capacity What do when throttled What do when throttled What do when throttled What do when throttled What do when throttled What do when throttled What do when throttled Optimizing CUs usage and cost Optimizing CUs usage and cost Reservations <> Capacities! Reservation : pool of available CU’s to be used in one or more Capacities E.g. Reservation of 64 CU’s: • 1x F64 • 2x F32 • 2x F16 + 1x F32 • 4x F4 + 2x F8 + 2x F16 ✅ Must do! Optimizing CUs usage and cost Reservation <> max amount of CU’s 💡 HINT : Reserve what you’re using on a daily base Combine with PAYG for infrequent usage Create Logic App to auto-pause PAYG Capacity Resume PAYG when needed E.g. can even be through Fabric API from a Notebook in the Capacity using reserved CU’s Optimizing CUs usage and cost Require Power BI Premium? PPU is still available! Price increase April 1 st 2025: $24 per month Move Power BI reports to separate Workspace(s) + activate PPU on these Workspace(s) Any F Capacity + Power BI Pro license = Power BI Premium FCC: Fabric Copilot Capacity Move all AI usage from the entire organization to a single Capacity Assigned to users Goal : move unpredictable AI usage away from predictable workload usage More ideas Use data from Capacity Metrics App or time-based triggers to: • Automatically scale up/down Capacity • Automatically move Workspaces to diYerent Capacities • Automatically pause/resume Capacities • Automatically create new Capacities Capacity Metrics App Tips: Calculations are done in 30-second time windows This is a regular Power BI Report à You can use the filters to drill down Capacity Metrics App Capacity Metrics App Why should you create separate Workspaces? How access can be managed in Fabric Workspace level roles: Admin, Member, Contributor, Viewer Item sharing: Read, Edit, Share Data sharing: Read, ReadData, ReadAll OneLake Security (preview) Sam’s golden rules for Workspace & Capacity design in Fabric Sam’s golden rules for Workspace & Capacity design in Fabric Sam’s golden rules for Workspace & Capacity design in Fabric Sam’s golden rules for Workspace & Capacity design in Fabric Slides Slides available at https://debruyn.dev/ fabcaptechorama Questions? sam@debruyn.dev https://debruyn.dev