Let me tell you a story of an imaginary company, Tell Me More Telco. The company has more than 100 clients, and their team is growing at an exponential rate to take care of the growing customer base. The company generates massive amounts of data and uses Power Bi to generate a few dashboards, but the effort in this area is scattered because of data fragmentation.
This is their present data scenario and the toolbase they use:
The image shows a few of the Azure services used by their Data Science and Analytics, Customer Service, and Data Engineering Departments. As you will notice, all of them are using different services for storing data. They are using the tool that is easiest for their team to use. Even though they are using Azure services, they have created data silos. There is no uniformity of data formats. As a result, there is a massive amount of data generated, but it is not accessible to departments that can use it. This leads to duplication of data and also several versions of data in different formats circulating among different departments. There are many data pipelines crisscrossing across departments, and maintaining them gets complicated and is a time-consuming process. The cost rises, and it’s hard to find legitimate data. With different data formats, they end up using various data technologies. The learning curve for each one varies, and security risk increases multiple-fold. Each technology comes with added licensing fees and a unique pricing structure.
This is a common scenario faced by so many companies. Microsoft has come up with an interesting solution for this scenario. Microsoft Fabric!
Fabric Data Products:
Microsoft Fabric is a composition of data products. Various data products are woven together to make Fabric. It is an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need. To begin with, data services are distributed into four major data functions.
All the data-related functions loosely fall into the above categories.
When all these functions combine into one unified platform, it is much easier to manage data for our imaginary company, Tell Me More Telco - and for your organization, too!
How is Fabric different?
- Analytics projects usually involve a bunch of different parts, and each one needs its own set of tools, often from different companies. Getting all those tools to work together can be tricky, time-consuming, and expensive. That’s where Fabric comes in. It gives you everything you need in one place, with a smooth, connected setup. It’s built as a cloud service (SaaS), so everything’s ready to go out of the box — no complicated setup. You can sign up in seconds and start seeing real results in just a few minutes. Fabric is designed to support every team involved in analytics. Whether you’re a data engineer, a data scientist, an analyst, or a business user, Fabric gives you the tools and experience that fit your role perfectly.
Here is a brief introduction to all the strands that come together to weave the Fabric.
- Data Factory makes it super easy to connect to over 150 different data sources — both in the cloud and on-premises. You can transform data using a simple drag-and-drop interface and set up data workflows without much hassle.
- Synapse Analytics lets you write and run Spark code easily, with live environments that start right away. It’s also great for working together with your team.
- Synapse Data Science gives data scientists everything they need to build powerful AI models. You can train, deploy, and manage your machine learning models all in one place — and it’s designed for teamwork.
- Synapse Data Warehousing combines a data lake and warehouse into one smooth experience. It offers super-fast SQL performance and works with open data formats.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics helps you analyze data as it’s coming in from IoT devices, logs, telemetry, and more. It handles huge amounts of data with low latency.
- Power BI in Fabric brings powerful visual tools and AI-powered analytics to help you make sense of your data. It’s also built into Microsoft 365, so you can see insights right inside the apps you already use.
- Data Activator watches your data in real time and can automatically send alerts or take action when certain patterns show up. No coding needed.
2. Simple, Open, and Built Around a Unified Data Lake
OneLake, a built-in, cloud-based data lake that works out of the box for everyone using Fabric. Just like Microsoft 365 apps connect to OneDrive, all Fabric tools are automatically connected to OneLake. It has a clean, easy-to-use hub where your data is neatly organized, searchable, shareable, and secure.
3. Fabric Gets Smarter with AI
Fabric is getting a big boost from AI, thanks to the Azure OpenAI Service. It’s built right into every part of Fabric to help you get more out of your data. Whether you’re a developer or a business user, you can use AI to explore your data, find insights, or even build things like data pipelines and machine learning models — all just by using plain, everyday language.
4. Fabric Helps Everyone in the Business Use Data Better
Tell Me More Telco executives want all employees to have access to the required data. Fabric makes that easier by working closely with the Microsoft 365 tools people already use all the time.
For example, Power BI is a big part of Fabric and is built right into Microsoft 365. Thanks to deep integration with tools like Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, users can quickly find and use data from OneLake without ever leaving the apps they know. That means more people can access insights and use them to drive real business value.
5. Less expensive, more available
Analytics systems combine products from multiple vendors in a single project. This results in computing capacity provisioned in multiple systems like data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence. When one of the systems is idle, its capacity cannot be used by another system. This leads to significant wastage.
Fabric has all the tools required for data processing. This makes it way easier (and cheaper) to share resources. Instead of buying separate resources for each task, you just buy one shared pool of computing power that all Fabric features can use. It’s a smarter, more flexible way to manage your analytics tools and save money at the same time.
Speaking of expenses, it is very important to stay on top of the ever- expanding bills for various services in Azure. That is where DoiT’s Azure Lens dashboard comes to the rescue. This is how you can see your expenses related to Azure services.
Just as Fabric is a unified analytics platform, DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ is a powerful solution to help you plan, procure, and operate your clouds for performance, resilience and security.
This blog is just the introduction to Fabric. We’ll analyze all the strands in subsequent blog posts to discover how they contribute to Fabric’s strength and colour.
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