Reduce Fabric CU usage and cut costs with a hybrid PBI Pro & F-SKU workspace model

May '24 (edited) • General

The licensing for Microsoft Fabric can be confusing to newcomers, especially when you are introducing Fabric as your in-house ETL tool whilst migrating existing PBI reports to the platform. Below is some information that may be most relevant and useful for individuals running an "F" SKU below F64, or that do not use Fabric scaled to F64 all the time and also possess Power BI Pro Licenses.

"Why is F64 relevant?" - When running workspaces licensed to Fabric on F64 or above, individuals can consume Power BI reports using a Fabric Free license. I.e. you do not need to purchase a Pro license for such users.

"But I don't have a need for F64. My user base is also far below the threshold to make it worth my while to scale up to F64 to save on the Pro license costs!" - Also fine. This post is for you specifically, and intended to advise how to keep your costs as low as possible as you grow, with being smart about your workspace layout.

Imagine you're a smaller use-case business, with only 40 Power BI users with Pro licenses to consume their PBI content. Maybe in addition, the Fabric-specific content you are creating (Pipelines, Notebooks, Data Flows) requires only F4 / F8. Far below the threshold to be thinking about scaling up to F64. Maybe also you only use Fabric once per day to run ETL pipelines, at which point the only use of the SKU is for users consuming those PBI reports.

You can cut your Fabric Capacity Unit usage if you do the following:

Keep your PBI Semantic Models and Reports in a separate workspace to your Lakehouse / Warehouse / Notebooks essentially split the PBI content from the Fabric content.
License the Fabric workspace to Fabric, and for the PBI content workspace, use the Pro License method.

What does this do?

Splitting your content in this manner means that the PBI report consumption will not count towards usage in the Fabric workspace. This means you can switch off the workspace entirely, thus ultimately cutting costs. You're fully utilising your Pro Licenses to host the PBI workspace, and don't have to run Fabric all day long.

It will also mean in the long run as your requirements grow, it will be a longer time before you need to scale up to a higher F-SKU to continue giving you the Fabric compute you require for daily tasks.

Limitations

Nothing comes without limitations unfortunately. Working in this manner means that the only content that you can consume during Fabric downtime is the PBI Semantic Model and Report content in the PBI Pro Licensed workspace. You cannot run queries to Warehouses / Lakehouse Endpoints in the Fabric workspace when paused, nor can you run ETL tasks. ALL Fabric content is in a paused state until that capacity comes back on.

For individuals who only require Fabric to update their PBI models at fixed times per day, and where your Production consumption comes from PBI only, this can apply to you.

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