Modern organizations are overwhelmed by data coming from every direction—applications, devices, users, and cloud services. The challenge is no longer just collecting data, but unifying, governing, analyzing, and acting on it efficiently. That’s where Microsoft Fabric comes in.
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, SaaS-based analytics platform designed to bring together data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence into a single, cohesive environment. Instead of stitching together multiple disconnected services, Fabric provides a unified experience built around a shared data foundation.
At the core of Fabric is OneLake, a centralized data lake that acts as the single source of truth for your organization. Think of it as “OneDrive for data” — a logical, unified storage layer that eliminates data silos and reduces duplication. All workloads within Fabric operate on top of OneLake, enabling teams to collaborate without constantly moving or copying data.
Fabric integrates several familiar Microsoft technologies into a single ecosystem. It includes capabilities from Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI, and data engineering tools, all accessible through a consistent interface and experience. Whether you're building pipelines, transforming data, training machine learning models, or creating executive dashboards, it all happens within the same platform.
One of the biggest advantages of Fabric is its SaaS-first design. There’s no infrastructure to provision, scale, or manage. Capacity, governance, security, and performance are centrally handled, allowing teams to focus on delivering insights instead of managing environments. This significantly lowers operational overhead and accelerates time-to-value.
For organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, Fabric feels like a natural evolution—bringing analytics, governance, AI, and reporting into one streamlined architecture. For others, it offers a compelling unified alternative to fragmented data stacks.
Now, you’re wondering – ok, that sounds great – but can Fabric resources can be automated, from a deployment perspective?
The response is yes – apart from the Azure resource itself (the Fabric capacity in Azure), that can be deployed with an ARM template, a bicep file or Terraform (
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.fabric/capacities), you can now also deploy things
inside the Fabric – controlling things such as workspaces, gateways, notebooks, spark pools and many other things.
For example – the equivalent of creating a Fabric Workspace in the fabric.microsoft.com portal can now be achieved with the following Terraform resource:
# Simple Workspace
resource "fabric_workspace" "example1" {
display_name = "example1"
description = "Example Workspace 1"
}
# Workspace with Capacity and Identity
data "fabric_capacity" "example" {
display_name = "example"
}
resource "fabric_workspace" "example2" {
display_name = "example2"
description = "Example Workspace 2"
capacity_id = data.fabric_capacity.example.id
identity = {
type = "SystemAssigned"
}
}
As you’ve probably seen in the link provided above, there are many more resources types that are actually sub-resources or complementary resources in relation to Microsoft Fabric that can be created with infrastructure-as-code.
So, by using the Terraform Fabric provider mentioned above, full on automation regarding Fabric deployments can now be achieved!
