The Core and Essence of Microsoft Fabric
FABRIC SERIES: FUNDAMENTALS 01— INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT FABRIC, WHAT, WHY FABRIC?
✐ Co-Author — Sen Sayantani
❑ Background
Over the past decade, there has been a notable increase in discussions highlighting the significance of data and strategies for extracting valuable insights out of it. Organizations, in their quest for deriving value from data, have actively explored and implemented plethora of technologies. The complex ML, AI & Data landscape is illustrated in the following graphic. Please refer FirstMark | 2023 MAD (ML/AI/Data) Landscape for interactive version.
However, amid these efforts, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Data Officers (CDOs) have come to the realization that their initiatives have often resulted in making complex systems with lots of different technologies, hundreds of vendors and thousands of services functions together diverting attention from the primary goal of maximizing the value derived from the data.
In May 2023, Microsoft announced Next generation data service fabric, an end-to-end unified analytics platform with an objective of enabling customers to take competitive edge out of data.
In this multi-blog series, we will go through different aspects of Microsoft fabric platform with primary focus on What & Why Fabric for this blog.
❑ What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need.
Fabric platform handles everything from data engineering, data science and real-time analytics to data storage and data migration. It’s a cohesive platform that integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI.
❑ Why Fabric?
Understanding Fabric’s primary goal — simplicity — is crucial. This tool enables organizations to merge data from various sources into one unified platform. By simplifying the process, it allows data experts to concentrate more on outcomes instead of the technology employed.
Below are the core design principles & features for Microsoft Fabric.
1. Complete Analytics platform
The platform is built on a foundation of Software as a Service (SaaS), which takes simplicity and integration to a whole new level.
SaaS delivers internet-hosted software applications to users, eliminating the need for them to manage underlying infrastructure. This model allows users to enjoy seamless scalability, automatic updates, and maintenance, with costs based on their usage.
Both developers and end users can utilize it, allowing individuals without IT expertise to get started within minutes. The user interface is reminiscent of Power BI and Microsoft 365, making it familiar and easy to navigate. Users can Scale up or down the processing power as we need.
2. Lake Centric and Open
Microsoft Fabric Lake is also known as OneLake. It’s built into the Fabric service and provides a unified location to store all organizational data where the experiences operate.
OneLake is single, unified, logical data lake for your whole organization. Like OneDrive, OneLake comes automatically with every Microsoft Fabric tenant and is designed to be the single place for all your analytics data. OneLake is the OneDrive for data for your organization.
There are 2 important principles for OneLake
- One data lake for the entire organization
- One copy of data for use with multiple analytical engines
❏ Every customer tenant has exactly one OneLake. There can never be more than one and if you have Fabric, there can never be zero.
❏ Every Fabric tenant automatically provisions OneLake, with no extra resources to set up or manage.
❏ OneLake is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 and can support any type of file, structured or unstructured. All Fabric data items like data warehouses and lakehouses store their data automatically in OneLake in Delta Parquet format.
❏ OneLake supports the same ADLS Gen2 APIs and SDKs to be compatible with existing ADLS Gen2 applications, including Azure Databricks. You can address data in OneLake as if it’s one big ADLS storage account for the entire organization.
3. Empower Every Business User
Microsoft Fabric provides a wide range of analytics tools that all work well together. It’s set up to help different types of users with specific tasks they need to do. Fabric covers everything you might need for analyzing data, all in one place.
Role-specific experience
Fabric empowers every team be it data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users in the analytics process with the role-specific experiences that they need making them feel right at home.
Data Engineering — Data Engineering in Microsoft Fabric offers a top-notch Spark platform enable Data Engineers large-scale data transformations and democratize data through the lakehouse.
Data Warehouse — The Data Warehouse experience delivers leading SQL performance and scalability, with separate scaling for compute and storage, and native support for the open Delta Lake format.
Data Science — The Data Science experience in Fabric streamlines building and deploying machine learning models by integrating with Azure Machine Learning for experiment tracking and model management, empowering data scientists to enhance data with predictions for richer BI reports and shifting analysis from descriptive to predictive insights.
Real-time Analytics — Real time observational data comes from many sources like apps and IoT devices, grows quickly, and is often in formats like JSON. It’s hard for old data systems to handle because there’s so much of it and it keeps changing. Real-Time Analytics is the best tool for analyzing this kind of data.
Power BI — Power BI ensures that business owners can access all the data in Fabric quickly and intuitively to make better decisions with data.
4. AI Powered
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric boosts efficiency, offers insights, and powers AI features. It simplifies routine tasks and automates data changes, making work easier and faster. With Copilot, data experts can easily explore, visualize, and study data through simple language.
Microsoft Fabric, integrated with OpenAI, offers cutting-edge AI capabilities, enhancing analytics, automation, and data insights. This collaboration brings powerful, intuitive AI tools to data professionals, streamlining complex processes and enabling more informed decision-making.
❑ Reference
What is Microsoft Fabric — Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
I hope this blog helped you in familiarizing with fundamental concepts of Microsoft Fabric.
Till then, Happy Learning!!!
Please Note — All opinions expressed here are my personal views and not of my employer.
Thought of the moment-
There are better starters than me but I’m a strong finisher — Usain Bolt
