Microsoft Build 2023 saw the announcement of Microsoft Fabric – “an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need” by combining various products including Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.
Additionally, “Fabric comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are automatically wired into OneLake, just like all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. “
To get more info about what Fabric is, check out the MS post here. To learn more about the licensing and pricing, read on 😊
Microsoft Fabric licensing
Microsoft Fabric takes its licensing model, and some of its terminology, from Power BI Premium which means parts of this may be familiar to you.
Each organisation must have 1 x “organisational” license and at least 1 x “individual” license and each subscription is broken down into tenants, capacities, and workspaces.
Organisational licenses
These provide the infrastructure for Microsoft Fabric – effectively this is what gets things provisioned in Azure so you have something to access/work with. There are 2 types which follow the Power BI Premium pattern:
Capacity – This provisions a set of resources in Azure with different SKUS providing different amounts of capacity, cores, RAM etc.
Premium Per User – Gives per-user access to Power BI elements on Microsoft Fabric, with shared capacity only.
Capacity SKUs
| SKU | Capacity Units | PAYG (Hourly) | PAYG (Monthly) | Power BI SKUs | Power BI v-cores |
| F2* | 2 | $0.36 | $262.80 | N/A | 0.25 |
| F4* | 4 | $0.72 | $525.60 | N/A | 0.5 |
| F8* | 8 | $1.44 | $1,051.20 | EM1/A1 | 1 |
| F16* | 16 | $2.88 | $2,102.40 | EM2/A2 | 2 |
| F32* | 32 | $5.76 | $4,204.80 | EM3/A3 | 4 |
| F64 | 64 | $11.52 | $8,409.60 | P1/A4 | 8 |
| F128 | 128 | $23.04 | $16,819.20 | P2/A5 | 16 |
| F256 | 256 | $46.08 | $33,638.40 | P3/A6 | 32 |
| F512 | 512 | $92.16 | $67,276.80 | P4/A7 | 64 |
| F1024 | 1024 | $184.32 | $134,553.60 | P5/A8 | 128 |
| F2048 | 2048 | $368.64 | $269,107.20 | N/A | 256 |
*SKUs smaller than F64 require all users, including those consuming content, to be licensed with a Power BI Pro license.
- The Azure “F” SKUs are billed PAYG per second
- The P SKUs are billed monthly/annually with a monthly commitment and support Fabric being enabled on top of the Power BI subscription.
- The EM SKUs do not support Fabric.
Individual licenses
Free – This allows users with access to Fabric capacity to create and share Fabric content
Pro – Required to create, share, and in some cases consume, Power BI content
This appears to show a differentiation between “Fabric content” and “Power BI content” – even if the Power BI content is being created within Fabric 🤔
Pricing and costs
As well as the SKU pricing above, there will also be additional costs for OneLake storage. Again based on costs in US West, the price is:
$0.023 per GB per month
That equals $23 per TB per month ($276 annually). 500TB of data in Fabric OneLake will be $138,000 per year and I feel like that’s probably a low amount of data for many organisations.
There are also potential bandwidth costs as data is accessed and moved between regions:
Managing these resources and costs can be done through a combination of the Fabric portal and Azure Cost Management:
Furthermore, Azure Reservations (Reserved Instances) are planned for later in 2023 which will make the Fabric capacity pricing comparable to the Power BI capacity pricing.
Microsoft resources
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/licenses
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 
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