Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place.
With Fabric, you don’t need to piece together different services from multiple vendors. Instead, you can enjoy a highly integrated, end-to-end, and easy-to-use product that is designed to simplify your analytics needs.
The platform is built on a foundation of Software as a Service (SaaS), which takes simplicity and integration to a whole new level.
An Integrated SaaS-Based Analytics Solution
Microsoft Fabric revolutionises the analytics landscape by seamlessly integrating various components from Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Explorer into a unified environment. This cohesive platform offers tailored user experiences for Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI, all built upon a shared Software as a Service (SaaS) foundation. This integration yields several key advantages:
- Extensive and deeply integrated analytics capabilities, setting new industry standards.
- Familiar and intuitive shared experiences across the platform, enabling ease of learning and adoption.
- Developers gain effortless access to a wide array of reusable assets.
- The ability to leverage a unified data lake, retaining data where it resides while utilising preferred analytics tools.
- Streamlined administration and governance across all experiences.
With the Microsoft Fabric SaaS experience, data and services seamlessly merge into a unified ecosystem. IT teams can centrally configure core enterprise capabilities, with permissions automatically applied throughout the underlying services. Additionally, data sensitivity labels are inherited consistently across the suite’s items.
Fabric empowers creators to focus on their core work, eliminating the need to handle the complexities of integrating, managing, or understanding the underlying infrastructure that supports the platform.
components
Microsoft Fabric is a cutting-edge analytics solution that seamlessly integrates a comprehensive set of tailored experiences for end-to-end analytical needs. These experiences are designed to work together seamlessly, providing industry-leading capabilities in the following categories:
Data Engineering: Empowers data engineers with a powerful Spark platform for large-scale data transformation and democratization through the lakehouse. Integration with Data Factory enables scheduling and orchestration of notebooks and Spark jobs.
Data Factory: Combines the simplicity of Power Query with the scalability of Azure Data Factory, offering over 200 native connectors to connect to on-premises and cloud data sources.
Data Science: Enables building, deploying, and operationalizing machine learning models seamlessly. Integration with Azure Machine Learning provides experiment tracking and model registry, empowering data scientists to enrich organizational data with predictions for predictive insights.
Data Warehouse: Delivers industry-leading SQL performance and scalability, with separate compute and storage scaling options and native support for the open Delta Lake format.
Real-Time Analytics: Provides a best-in-class engine for analyzing observational data collected from diverse sources like apps, IoT devices, and human interactions. It excels in handling high-volume, semi-structured data with shifting schemas.
Power BI: The world’s leading Business Intelligence platform, allowing business owners to intuitively access and leverage data from Fabric for informed decision-making.
Fabric unifies all these experiences into a cohesive platform, offering the most comprehensive big data analytics solution in the industry. It enables organizations and individuals to harness the potential of their large and complex data repositories, transforming them into actionable insights. Additionally, Microsoft Fabric is an implementation of the data mesh architecture, aligning with modern data management principles.
OneLake and lakehouse
The Microsoft Fabric platform consolidates the OneLake and lakehouse architecture, providing a unified solution for enterprises.
The Microsoft Fabric platform is built upon a robust data lake foundation known as OneLake. OneLake, also referred to as Microsoft Fabric Lake, serves as a unified storage location for all organisational data, enabling seamless operation across various experiences.
OneLake leverages the power of ADLS (Azure Data Lake Storage) Gen2, offering a comprehensive SaaS experience that caters to both professional and citizen developers. This unified experience simplifies the usage of Fabric services by abstracting infrastructure concepts such as resource groups, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), Azure Resource Manager, redundancy, and regions. Remarkably, users are not even required to possess an Azure account.
By eliminating the prevalent issue of fragmented data silos created by individual developers provisioning their isolated storage accounts, OneLake establishes a single, cohesive storage system for all developers. This centralised approach facilitates effortless data discovery and sharing while ensuring adherence to policy and security settings in a centralised and consistent manner.
structure of onelake and lakehouses
All Microsoft Fabric compute experiences are seamlessly integrated with OneLake, similar to how Office applications utilise organisational OneDrive. Experiences such as Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Factory, Power BI, and Real-Time Analytics utilise OneLake as their native storage without requiring additional configuration. OneLake allows instant mounting of existing PaaS storage accounts through the Shortcut feature, eliminating the need for data migration. Shortcuts enable easy data sharing between users and applications without duplication or movement. This shortcut capability extends to other storage systems, enabling the composition and analysis of data across clouds with intelligent caching that reduces egress costs and optimises data proximity to compute resources.
Conclusion
Microsoft Fabric is revolutionising the way enterprises approach distributed application development and management. By providing a powerful, integrated platform that abstracts away infrastructure complexities, Microsoft Fabric empowers developers to focus on what truly matters – building innovative applications. With its comprehensive analytics capabilities, unified data lake, and extensive resources, Microsoft Fabric is poised to reshape the landscape of distributed application development. Embrace the power of Microsoft Fabric and unlock a new era of agility, scalability, and efficiency in your organisation’s digital journey.
Please note that Microsoft Fabric is currently in the preview stage. As a prerelease product, it is subject to significant modifications before its official release. Use this link to find step-by-step tutorials on Microsoft Fabric.
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