Fabric FinOps - Cost Optimization for Fabric

A software-as-a-service offering such as Microsoft Fabric offers a fixed cost per month, making budgeting much easier. That should be the end of the conversation, but it's actually only the beginning - how do you make the most of the capacity units you get with the fixed price? How can you ensure that you are getting the most out of your monthly investment? The different Fabric workloads all have different ways of using capacity units - some are cost CUs per minute of runtime, some cost per query, some are straight forward to calculate, some are not.

Take dataflows gen 2 an an example - it used to be the most expensive way by far of doing data integration compared to pipelines or copy jobs, but what does "expensive" mean in the grand scheme of things? Depending on your organization's previous experience and skill level, dataflows might instead end up being the cheapest option!
There is much more to optimizing the bang for your buck with Fabric than only looking at the relative costs of capacity units, as it is easy to get lost in the technology instead of looking at the big picture.

This session will look at capacity units as a concept, compare how the different workloads drive capacity unit usage, explore ways to optimize workload usage to decrease compute costs, and discuss other factors that impact the overall cost conversation around Fabric.

Introduce Capacity Units (CUs) Identify cost drivers in Fabric Explore ways to optimize workload usage