At the recent annual Build Conference, Microsoft introduced a unified analytics platform with Microsoft Fabric that brings together all the data and analytics that organizations need.
Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview and provides data integration, engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, applied observability, and business intelligence under a single architecture by integrating services such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Data Activator, and Power BI. In addition, it comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called "OneLake" that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant.
Arun Ulagaratchagan, corporate vice president, Azure Data, explains in an Azure Analytics blog post:
All Fabric workloads are automatically wired into OneLake, just like all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. Data is organized in an intuitive data hub and automatically indexed for discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance.
Under the hood, OneLake offers a centralized storage system that unifies data and simplifies data discovery and sharing while ensuring strict enforcement of policy and security settings. At the API layer, OneLake is built upon and seamlessly integrates with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLSg2), providing instant access to ADLSg2's extensive ecosystem of applications, tools, and developers.
OneLake's key feature, "Shortcuts," enables data sharing among users and applications without the need for redundant movement or duplication of information by virtualizing data lake storage in ADLSg2, Amazon S3, and soon Google Storage, allowing developers to integrate and analyze data across multiple cloud environments.
Matthew Roche, a principal program manager of Fabric CAT at Microsoft, states in his blog post on Microsoft Fabric:
With Fabric, each task and persona has a purpose-built set of experiences that all work natively with the same data in OneLake. The result is that data practitioners can focus on delivering value through their data work.. not on building integrations so their tools will work together.
The company also infused Microsoft Fabric with Azure OpenAI Service at every layer, allowing users to leverage generative AI's power against their data. Moreover, by utilizing Copilot within Microsoft Fabric across all data experiences, users can leverage conversational language for tasks such as creating dataflows and data pipelines, generating code and complete functions, constructing machine learning models, and visualizing outcomes.
Aadit Sheth, a freelancer, tweeted:
Microsoft Fabric can help businesses of all sizes gain insights from their data and make better decisions.
In addition, Mimoune Djouallah, a business intelligence analyst at Downer, tweeted:
Microsoft #fabric is basically a centralized lakehouse but with security and multiple Compute Engines for specific Workloads.
More details and guidance for Microsoft Fabric are available in an e-Book, end-to-end tutorials, Microsoft Learn modules, and the documentation landing page.