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Choosing the Right Microsoft Fabric Architecture for Your Business Size
When it comes to Microsoft Fabric, one size does not fit all. The way you design your workspaces, pipelines, and capacity strategy can have a huge impact on performance, cost, and the experience of your end users.
Here are my recommendations for how to set up your Fabric architecture depending on your business size and goals.
1. Small Businesses – Keep It Simple to Save Costs
If you’re a small business just getting started with Fabric, I recommend keeping things lean and cost-efficient.
One Fabric Workspace for all ETL and architecture artifacts (dataflows, datasets, lakehouses, etc.).
Power BI Pro Workspaces for semantic models and reports in production.
Why this works:
By hosting only your ETL in Fabric capacity and running your production reports in Power BI Pro workspaces, you save on Fabric compute costs while still delivering performant reports to your audience.
2. Medium Businesses – Deployment Pipelines for Control
As your organization grows, so does the need for structured change management.
Continue using a single ETL Fabric workspace for simplicity.
Implement two deployment pipelines:
Architecture Pipeline – at least Dev → Prod for ETL and data model changes.
Reporting Pipeline – to match, ensuring report changes are tested before hitting production.
Why this works:
You protect the end-user experience by controlling when changes roll out. And by keeping reporting in Pro workspaces, you can still run on a smaller Fabric SKU while maintaining governance.
3. Large Organizations – Full Fabric for Scale and AI
If you’re running an enterprise-scale analytics environment, it’s time to go big:
F64 capacity or above to unlock Copilot and advanced Fabric capabilities.
All workspaces on Fabric capacity for maximum performance and AI integration.
Use deployment pipelines and/or GitHub integration to manage Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for both architecture and reporting.
Why this works:
Copilot in Fabric can significantly reduce the workload on your analytics team, while a fully Fabric-powered architecture streamlines the flow from raw data to insights. Governance and automation tools ensure your data environment scales without chaos.
Bottom line:
Small businesses should optimize for cost, medium businesses for governance, and large organizations for scale and automation. No matter your size, starting with the right architecture will save you headaches — and money — down the road.
