Microsoft Fabric
One capacity, one lake, one bill
Fabric puts Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Real-Time Intelligence, Databases and Power BI on one pooled capacity over one lake. You buy compute in capacity units, from F2 upward, billed by the second with no commitment. Every workload draws from the same pool, so one badly written notebook competes with a dashboard refresh. Capacity is the whole commercial conversation.
How Fabric is priced.
F2 and up
The F SKU scale runs F2 to F8192, billed per second. F2 is the entry point and enables Copilot and data agents.
Reserved capacity
One or three year reservation, bought in single capacity unit increments. About 41% saving (Microsoft published).
F64 threshold
At F64 and above, free-licence users can view Power BI content. Below it, viewers need Pro or Premium Per User.
Pause and resume
An F capacity pauses when idle, stopping compute billing. Storage keeps billing. F SKUs only.
Mirroring
One terabyte of free mirroring storage per capacity unit. Replication compute is free.
Model, land, then govern.
Model
Capacity sizing against real query and refresh patterns, weighed against the F64 viewer threshold, so the SKU is chosen on arithmetic.
Done looks like: A sized capacity and a monthly number you can defend.
Land
OneLake with shortcuts and mirroring in place of another copy, semantic models built once, workspaces and domains set for delegated ownership.
Done looks like: One lake, no duplicate pipelines, an owner on every workspace.
Govern
Purview sensitivity labels and data loss prevention over Fabric items, workspace roles, private links where the network demands them.
Done looks like: A catalogue people can search and a label on what is sensitive.
Copilot in Fabric and Canadian data residency
Fabric capacity and OneLake data stay in Canada Central or Canada East. Copilot inference does not: Microsoft hosts Azure OpenAI for Fabric in United States regions and inside the EU data boundary, and for a Canadian capacity, Copilot stays disabled until an administrator turns on processing outside the capacity’s region. No Canada-resident inference option is documented today. If residency is a hard requirement, settle it before the capacity is bought.
Reservation saving figure is Microsoft’s published approximate saving, current at 25 August 2026.
Talk to AIM about Fabric.
Bring your current environment and we’ll walk through where AIM’s CSP program changes the licensing, the architecture, or both.