Today’s world is awash with data—ever-streaming from the devices we use, the applications we construct, and the interactions we’ve got. Organizations across every industry have harnessed this data to digitally transform and gain competitive benefits. And now, as we enter a brand new era defined by AI, this data is becoming much more necessary.
Generative AI and language model services, equivalent to Azure OpenAI Service, are enabling customers to make use of and create on a regular basis AI experiences which might be reinventing how employees spend their time. Powering organization-specific AI experiences requires a relentless supply of fresh data from a well-managed and highly integrated analytics system. But most organizations’ analytics systems are a labyrinth of specialised and disconnected services.
And it’s no wonder given the massively fragmented data and AI technology market with a whole lot of vendors and 1000’s of services. Customers must stitch together a posh set of disconnected services from multiple vendors themselves and incur the prices and burdens of constructing these services function together.
Introducing Microsoft Fabric
Today we’re unveiling Microsoft Fabric—an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the information and analytics tools that organizations need. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI right into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the muse for the era of AI.
Watch a fast overview:
What sets Microsoft Fabric apart?
Fabric is an end-to-end analytics product that addresses every aspect of a corporation’s analytics needs. But there are five areas that actually set Fabric other than the remainder of the market:
1. Fabric is an entire analytics platform
Every analytics project has multiple subsystems. Every subsystem needs a distinct array of capabilities, often requiring products from multiple vendors. Integrating these products is usually a complex, fragile, and expensive endeavor.
With Fabric, customers can use a single product with a unified experience and architecture that gives all of the capabilities required for a developer to extract insights from data and present it to the business user. And by delivering the experience as software as a service (SaaS), every thing is routinely integrated and optimized, and users can enroll inside seconds and get real business value inside minutes.
Fabric empowers every team within the analytics process with the role-specific experiences they need, so data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users feel right at home.
Fabric comes with seven core workloads:
- Data Factory (preview) provides greater than 150 connectors to cloud and on-premises data sources, drag-and-drop experiences for data transformation, and the power to orchestrate data pipelines.
- Synapse Data Engineering (preview) enables great authoring experiences for Spark, easy start with live pools, and the power to collaborate.
- Synapse Data Science (preview) provides an end-to-end workflow for data scientists to construct sophisticated AI models, collaborate easily, and train, deploy, and manage machine learning models.
- Synapse Data Warehousing (preview) provides a converged lake house and data warehouse experience with industry-leading SQL performance on open data formats.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics (preview) enables developers to work with data streaming in from the Web of Things (IoT) devices, telemetry, logs, and more, and analyze massive volumes of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency.
- Power BI in Fabric provides industry-leading visualization and AI-driven analytics that enable business analysts and business users to achieve insights from data. The Power BI experience can also be deeply integrated into Microsoft 365, providing relevant insights where business users already work.
- Data Activator (coming soon) provides real-time detection and monitoring of information and may trigger notifications and actions when it finds specified patterns in data—all in a no-code experience.
You possibly can try these experiences today by signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
2. Fabric is lake-centric and open
Today’s data lakes will be messy and sophisticated, making it hard for patrons to create, integrate, manage, and operate data lakes. And once they’re operational, multiple data products using different proprietary data formats on the identical data lake could cause significant data duplication and concerns about vendor lock-in.
OneLake—The OneDrive for data
Fabric comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake that’s built-in and routinely available to each Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are routinely wired into OneLake, similar to all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. Data is organized in an intuitive data hub, and routinely indexed for discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance.
OneLake serves developers, business analysts, and business users alike, helping eliminate pervasive and chaotic data silos created by different developers provisioning and configuring their very own isolated storage accounts. As an alternative, OneLake provides a single, unified storage system for all developers, where discovery and sharing of information are easy with policy and security settings enforced centrally. On the API layer, OneLake is built on and fully compatible with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLSg2), immediately tapping into ADLSg2’s vast ecosystem of applications, tools, and developers.
A key capability of OneLake is “Shortcuts.” OneLake allows easy sharing of information between users and applications without having to maneuver and duplicate information unnecessarily. Shortcuts allow OneLake to virtualize data lake storage in ADLSg2, Amazon Easy Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Google Storage (coming soon), enabling developers to compose and analyze data across clouds.
Open data formats across analytics offerings
Fabric is deeply committed to open data formats across all its workloads and tiers. Fabric treats Delta on top of Parquet files as a native data format that’s the default for all workloads. This deep commitment to a typical open data format implies that customers have to load the information into the lake just once and all of the workloads can operate on the identical data, without having to individually ingest it. It also implies that OneLake supports structured data of any format and unstructured data, giving customers total flexibility.
By adopting OneLake as our store and Delta and Parquet because the common format for all workloads, we provide customers a knowledge stack that’s unified at probably the most fundamental level. Customers don’t need to take care of different copies of information for databases, data lakes, data warehousing, business intelligence, or real-time analytics. As an alternative, a single copy of the information in OneLake can directly power all of the workloads.
Managing data security (table, column, and row levels) across different data engines is usually a persistent nightmare for patrons. Fabric will provide a universal security model that’s managed in OneLake, and all engines implement it uniformly as they process queries and jobs. This model is coming soon.
3. Fabric is powered by AI
We’re infusing Fabric with Azure OpenAI Service at every layer to assist customers unlock the complete potential of their data, enabling developers to leverage the ability of generative AI against their data and assisting business users to search out insights of their data. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric in every data experience, users can use conversational language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and full functions, construct machine learning models, or visualize results. Customers may even create their very own conversational language experiences that mix Azure OpenAI Service models and their data and publish them as plug-ins.
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric builds on our existing commitments to data security and privacy within the enterprise. Copilot inherits a corporation’s security, compliance, and privacy policies. Microsoft doesn’t use organizations’ tenant data to coach the bottom language models that power Copilot.
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric shall be coming soon. Stay tuned to the Microsoft Fabric blog for the newest updates and public release date for Copilot in Microsoft Fabric.
4. Fabric empowers every business user
Customers aspire to drive a knowledge culture where everyone of their organization is making higher decisions based on data. To assist our customers foster this culture, Fabric deeply integrates with the Microsoft 365 applications people use on daily basis.
Power BI is a core a part of Fabric and is already infused across Microsoft 365. Through Power BI’s deep integrations with popular applications equivalent to Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, relevant data from OneLake is definitely discoverable and accessible to users right from Microsoft 365—helping customers drive more value from their data
With Fabric, you’ll be able to turn your Microsoft 365 apps into hubs for uncovering and applying insights. For instance, users in Microsoft Excel can directly discover and analyze data in OneLake and generate a Power BI report with a click of a button. In Teams, users can infuse data into their on a regular basis work with embedded channels, chat, and meeting experiences. Business users can bring data into their presentations by embedding live Power BI reports directly in Microsoft PowerPoint. Power BI can also be natively integrated with SharePoint, enabling easy sharing and dissemination of insights. And with Microsoft Graph Data Connect (preview), Microsoft 365 data is natively integrated into OneLake so customers can unlock insights on their customer relationships, business processes, security and compliance, and folks productivity.
5. Fabric reduces costs through unified capacities
Today’s analytics systems typically mix products from multiple vendors in a single project. This ends in computing capability provisioned in multiple systems like data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence. When one in every of the systems is idle, its capability can’t be utilized by one other system causing significant wastage.
Purchasing and managing resources is massively simplified with Fabric. Customers should buy a single pool of computing that powers all Fabric workloads. With this all-inclusive approach, customers can create solutions that leverage all workloads freely with none friction of their experience or commerce. The universal compute capacities significantly reduce costs, as any unused compute capability in a single workload will be utilized by any of the workloads.
Explore how our customers are already using Microsoft Fabric
Ferguson
Ferguson is a number one distributor of plumbing, HVAC, and waterworks supplies, operating across North America. And through the use of Fabric to consolidate their analytics stack right into a unified solution, they’re hoping to scale back their delivery time and improve efficiency.
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—George Rasco, Principal Database Architect, Ferguson
See Fabric in motion at Ferguson:
T-Mobile
T-Mobile, one in every of the biggest providers of wireless communications services in the USA, is concentrated on driving disruption that creates innovation and higher customer experiences in wireless and beyond. With Fabric, T-Mobile hopes they’ll take their platform and data-driven decision-making to the following level.
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—Geoffrey Freeman, MTS, Data Solutions and Analytics, T-Mobile
Aon
Aon provides skilled services and management consulting services to an enormous global network of shoppers. With the assistance of Fabric, Aon hopes that they’ll consolidate more of their current technology stack and deal with adding more value to their clients.
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—Boby Azarbod, Data Services Lead, Aon
What happens to current Microsoft analytics solutions?
Existing Microsoft products equivalent to Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Data Explorer will proceed to offer a sturdy, enterprise-grade platform as a service (PaaS) solution for data analytics. Fabric represents an evolution of those offerings in the shape of a simplified SaaS solution that may hook up with existing PaaS offerings. Customers will have the ability to upgrade from their current products into Fabric at their very own pace.
Start with Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview. Check out every thing Fabric has to supply by signing up for the free trial—no bank card information is required. Everyone who signs up gets a set Fabric trial capability, which could also be used for any feature or capability from integrating data to creating machine learning models. Existing Power BI Premium customers can simply activate Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. After July 1, 2023, Fabric shall be enabled for all Power BI tenants.
Microsoft Fabric resources
If you must learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:
- Reading the more in-depth Fabric experience announcement blogs:
- Joining the Fabric community to post your questions, share your feedback, and learn from others.