At Build 2023 today, Microsoft revealed "Fabric", its new unified end-to-end analytics solution. What Fabric basically does, it becomes the umbrella platform that integrates into one of the various analytics and data services and products that the tech giant offers. This means Azure Data, Power BI, Synapse, are all under the blanket of Fabric now, as a single Software as a Service (SaaS) product.
And as is the case with almost everything nowadays in the technology world, Fabric will have the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) of course, with the aid of Azure OpenAI and Copilot. Microsoft has explained in brief about why it feels Fabric is better than its competing products:
What sets Microsoft Fabric apart?
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end analytics product that addresses every aspect of an organization’s analytics needs.
[..] With Microsoft Fabric, customers can use a single product with a unified experience and architecture that provides all 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), everything is automatically integrated and optimized, and users can sign up within seconds and get real business value within minutes.
Microsoft has outlined the seven core areas that Fabric covers:
Fabric comes with seven core workloads:
- Data Factory provides 150+ connectors to cloud and on-prem data sources, drag and drop experiences for data transformation, and the ability to orchestrate data pipelines. Currently in Public Preview.
- Synapse Data Engineering enables great authoring experiences for Spark, instant start with livepools, and the ability to collaborate. Currently in Public Preview.
- Synapse Data Science provides an end-to-end workflow for data scientists to build sophisticated AI models, collaborate easily, and train, deploy, and manage machine learning models. Currently in Public Preview.
- Synapse Data Warehousing provides a converged lake house and data warehouse experience with industry-leading SQL performance on open data formats. Currently in Public Preview.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics enables developers to work with data streaming in from IoT devices, telemetry, logs, etc. and analyze massive volumes of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency. Currently in Public Preview.
- Power BI in Microsoft Fabric provides industry-leading visualization and AI driven analytics that enable business analysts and business users to gain insights from data. The Power BI experience is also deeply integrated into Microsoft 365, providing relevant insights where business users already work.
- Data Activator provides real-time detection and monitoring of data and can trigger notifications and actions when it finds specified patterns in data—all in a no-code experience. Currently in Private Preview.
Microsoft also revealed its new "OneLake" storage solution (as you may have noticed in the image above), associated with Fabric. You can sign up for free trial of Microsoft Fabric on this page. You can learn more about Fabric on its website.
In case you want to read more, you can find the rest of the Build 2023 coverage here.
