Introducing Microsoft Fabric: a data platform for the era of artificial intelligence | Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure (2023)

Today's world is awash with data - constantly streaming from the devices we use, the apps we create, and our interactions. Organizations in every industry have used this data to digitally transform and gain a competitive advantage. And as we enter a new era defined by AI, that data becomes even more important.

Generative AI and language modeling services like Azure OpenAI enable users to leverage and create everyday AI experiences that reinvent the way employees spend their time. Supporting organization-specific AI environments requires a constant supply of clean data from a well-managed and highly integrated analytics system. However, the analytics systems of most organizations are a maze of specialized and unrelated services.

And no wonder, given the extremely fragmented market for data and AI technologies with hundreds of service providers and thousands of services. Customers must assemble a complex set of disjointed services from multiple providers and bear the cost and burden of ensuring that these services work together.

Meet Microsoft Fabric

Today we revealMicrosoft Fabric- a comprehensive, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics that organizations need. Fabric integrates technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI into one unified product, enabling both data professionals and

See a brief overview:

How is Microsoft Fabric different?

Fabric is a comprehensive analytics product that addresses all aspects of an organization's analytics needs. However, there are five areas where Fabric really stands out from the rest of the market:

1. Fabric is a complete analytical platform

Every analytics project has many subsystems. Each subsystem requires a different set of capabilities, often requiring products from multiple vendors. Integrating these products can be a complex, delicate and expensive undertaking.

With Fabric, users can use one product with a unified experience and architecture that provides all the capabilities a developer needs to extract insights from data and present them to the business user. With Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery, everything is automatically integrated and optimized, users can sign up in seconds and get real business value in minutes.

Fabric gives every team in the analytics process the role-based experiences they need, making data engineers, data warehousing experts, data analysts, and business users feel right at home.

The fabric comes in seven basic weights:

• Data factory (Notice)offers more than 150 connectors for cloud and on-premises data sources, a drag-and-drop environment for data transformation, and the ability to orchestrate data pipelines.
• Synapse Data Engineering (Overview)provides a great authoring environment for Spark that lets you get started with live pools and collaboration right away.
• Synapse Data Science (pregled)provides an end-to-end workflow for data scientists to build advanced AI models, easily collaborate and train, deploy and manage machine learning models.
• Synaptic data storage (Notice)provides a converged Lake House and data warehouse environment with leading SQL performance in open data formats.
• Synapse analysis in real time (Notice)enables developers to work with streaming data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, telemetry, logs, and more, and analyze massive amounts of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency.
• Power-BIin Fabric provides industry-leading visualization and AI-powered analytics that help business analysts and business users gain insights from data. ThePower BI experienceit's also deeply integrated with Microsoft 365, providing relevant insights where business users already work.
• Data activator (Soon)it enables real-time data discovery and monitoring, and can trigger notifications and actions when certain patterns are found in the data, all without code.

You can try these experiences today viasign up for a free trial of Microsoft Fabric.

2. The fabric is more centered and open

Today's data lakes can be chaotic and complex, making it difficult for users to create, integrate, manage and maintain data lakes. And running multiple data products with different proprietary data formats in the same data lake can lead to significant data duplication and vendor dependency issues.

OneLake - OneDrive for data

Fabric comes with a multi-cloud SaaS data lake called OneLake that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are automatically connected to OneLake, just as all Microsoft 365 applications are connected to OneDrive. Data is organized in an intuitive data center and automatically indexed for discovery, provisioning, management and compliance.

OneLake serves developers, business analysts, and business users alike by helping to eliminate the ubiquitous and chaotic data silos created by various developers by securing and configuring their own isolated storage accounts. Instead, OneLake provides a single unified storage system for all developers, where data discovery and sharing is easy with centrally enforced security rules and settings. At the API layer, OneLake is built and fully compatible with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLSg2), connecting directly to the vast ecosystem of ADLSg2 applications, tools and developers.

OneLake's main feature is "Shortcuts". With OneLake, you can easily share data between users and applications without unnecessarily moving and duplicating information. Shortcuts enable OneLake to virtualize data storage on ADLSg2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Google Storage (coming soon), enabling developers to compile and analyze data in the cloud.

Open data formats in all analytics offerings

Fabric is strongly committed to open data formats across all of its workloads and tiers. Fabric treats Delta files on top of Parquet files as the native data format, the default format for all workloads. This deep commitment to a common open data format means users only need to load data into the lake once and all workloads can run on the same data without having to import it separately. This also means that OneLake supports structured data of any format as well as unstructured data, giving users complete flexibility.

By using OneLake as our storefront and Delta and Parquet as a common format for all workloads, we provide customers with a data set that is unified at the most basic level. Users do not need to maintain multiple copies of data for databases, data lakes, data warehouses, business intelligence or real-time analytics. Instead, a single copy of the data in OneLake can run all workloads directly.

Managing data security (at the table, column and row level) across different data drives can be a constant nightmare for users. Fabric will provide a universal security model managed in OneLake, and all engines will enforce this in a unique way when processing queries and tasks. This model will be available soon.

3. The fabric is powered by artificial intelligence

We stuff the fabricAzure Open AIat every layer to help users unlock the full potential of their data, enabling developers to harness the generative power of artificial intelligence on their data and help business users find insights from their data. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, users in any data environment can use a conversational language to create data flows and data pipelines, generate code and complete functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. Customers can even create their own speech environments that combine 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 in the enterprise. Copilot adopts the organization's security, compliance and privacy policies. Microsoft does not use your organization's tenant data to train the underlying language models that support Copilot.

Copilot is coming soon to Microsoft Fabric. Stay with usBlog Microsoft Fabricfor the latest updates and public release date for Copilot on Microsoft Fabric.

4. The substance expands the possibilities of every business user

Customers aspire to a data culture where everyone in their organization makes better, data-driven decisions. To help our clients develop this culture, Fabric integrates deeply withMicrosoft 365 Appspeople use every day.

Power BI is a key component of Fabric and is already integrated with Microsoft 365. With Power BI deep integration with popular applications such as Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint and SharePoint, relevant data from OneLake is easy to find and can be accessed by users directly from Microsoft 365 - Helping users get more value out of their data

With Fabric, you can turn your Microsoft 365 applications into hubs for discovering and applying insights. For example, Microsoft Excel users can search and analyze data directly in OneLake and generate a Power BI report with the click of a button. In Teams, users can bring data into their daily work using built-in channels, conversations, and meeting experiences. Business users can incorporate data into their presentations by embedding current Power BI reports directly into Microsoft PowerPoint. Power BI is also natively integrated with SharePoint for easy sharing and distribution of insights. And with Microsoft Graph Data Connect (Preview), Microsoft 365 data is natively integrated with OneLake, enabling users to gain insights into customer relationships, business processes, security and compliance, and people productivity.

5. Fabric reduces costs by standardizing performance

Today's analytical systems typically combine products from multiple vendors into a single design. This results in the delivery of computing power to multiple systems, such as data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, and business analytics. When one of the systems is idle, the other system cannot use the capacity, which causes significant losses.

Purchasing and resource management is greatly simplified with Fabrica. Customers can purchase a single capacity pool that supports all fabric workloads. This end-to-end approach enables clients to create solutions that freely leverage all workloads, without any friction in their experience or profession. Universal compute capacity significantly reduces costs because unused capacity in one workload can be used by any workload.

Learn how our customers are already using Microsoft Fabric

Ferguson

Ferguson is a leading distributor of plumbing, HVAC and plumbing supplies operating throughout North America. By using Fabric to consolidate a set of analytics into a single solution, they hope to reduce lead times and improve efficiency.

“Microsoft Fabric reduces delivery time by eliminating the burden of using multiple services. By consolidating the core services of data sharing, transformation, modeling and analysis into a single user interface, the time from raw data to business intelligence is dramatically reduced. Fabric has a significant impact on data storage, engineering and analytics at Ferguson because all of these tasks can now be performed in the same user interface, accelerating the delivery of insights”.

(Video) Microsoft Fabric - AI Powered Data Analytics

—George Rasco, Chief Database Architect, Ferguson

See fabrics in action in Ferguson:

t-Mobile

T-Mobile, one of the largest providers of wireless communications services in the United States, is focused on delivering breakthroughs that create innovation and better user experiences in wireless networks and beyond. With Fabric, T-Mobile hopes to take its platform and data-driven decision-making to the next level.

“T-Mobile loves its users and offers them new Un-Carrier benefits! We believe Fabric's upcoming capabilities will help us eliminate data silos, making it easier for us to unlock new insights into how we show even more love to our customers. Searching the entire lake house and warehouse with one engine is a game changer. Spark Compute on demand, instead of waiting for clusters to spin up, is a huge improvement for basic data engineering as well as advanced analytics. It saves you three minutes on each task, and when you're doing thousands of tasks an hour, that really adds up. And the ability to easily share data sets across the company will eliminate so much data duplication. We are very much looking forward to these new features”.

—Geoffrey Freeman, MTS, Data Solutions and Analytics, T-Mobile

Already

Aon provides professional and business advisory services to a broad global network of clients. With the help of Fabric, Aon hopes to consolidate more of its current technologies and focus on adding more value to its customers.

“What I find most exciting about Fabric is the simplification of our existing set of analytics. There are so many different PaaS services out there today that when it comes to upgrading for many developers, Fabric helps simplify it. Now we can spend less time building infrastructure and more time adding value to our business”.

- Boby Azarbod, Data Services Manager, Aon

What will happen to Microsoft's current analytics solutions?

Existing Microsoft products such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Explorer will continue to provide a robust platform as a service (PaaS) solution for data analytics. Fabric represents the evolution of this offering in the form of a simplified SaaS solution that can be connected to existing PaaS offerings. Customers can transition from current products to Fabric at their own pace.

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview. Try everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for a free trial - no credit card information required. Anyone who signs up gets a permanent Fabric trial that can be used for any feature or capability, from data integration to building machine learning models. Existing Power BI Premium users can easily enable the structure through the Power BI admin portal. After July 1, 2023, fabric will be enabled for all Power BI tenants.

Close the door to Microsoft Fabric

To learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider the following:

• By applying toMicrosoft Fabric Free Trial.

• SightseeingWitryna Microsoft Fabric.

• Read more detailed fabric announcement blogs:
  • Data Factory experience on Fabric blog
  • Experience with Synapse Data Engineering on the Fabric blog
  • Experience in Synapse Data Science on the Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Warehousing op Fabric
  • Synapse Real-Time Analytics na blogu Fabric
  • Power BI blog announcement
  • The Data Activator experience on the Fabric blog
  • Fabric blog administration and management
  • OneLake blog in the dust
  • Backbone event broadcast blog
  • Integrating Microsoft 365 data into Fabric blog
  • Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric integration blog

• ReconnaissanceTechnical documentation of the substance.

• Read the free eBook to get started with Fabric.

• Discover the fabric throughGuided tour.

• Taking partfabric communityask questions, share opinions and learn from others.