Microsoft Fabric (SKU F) - The most economical Power BI license

Hey guys!
In this article, I will share with you more information about licensing Microsoft Fabric (SKU F), which costs from R$1.03 per hour on. You can purchase this license through the Azure Portal, allowing you to insert your reports into third-party applications, where you do not need a PRO account to view the reports and you can even pause/resume the resource to save even more and also upscale and downscale dynamically using the API.

In this article, we will discover the characteristics of this type of licensing, when it is interesting and when it is not.

Summary of all Power BI license types:

Microsoft Fabric (SKU F)

Summary

Launched in May 2023, the Microsoft Fabric license is aimed at small, medium and large companies, with a large number of users, and with the need to insert reports into internal and/or external applications, where users do not need to pay a license to view the reports or build modern DW and Lakehouse projects, since this license is a set of integrated tools.

In this type of licensing, users do not even need a Power BI account to view the reports and can even use personal emails (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.), but viewing users do not access the Power BI portal (powerbi.com) but rather a web portal that the company will need to hire or develop internally. This is how users without a PRO license can view reports without needing a license.

This type of access where the company will use a personalized portal can open up several possibilities of having a personalized URL (e.g. bi.suaempresa.com.br), a completely personalized look, deviating from the powerbi.com standard, infinite possibilities for integrations, customizations and even being able to implement features that not even the Power BI service has, such as Dark Theme, reports organized in multi-level folders and much more.

The process of creating and publishing reports continues exactly the same way: User who is going to publish reports needs a PRO account, develops the report in Power BI Desktop, publishes it in a workspace, configures updates, gateways and access credentials. The permission and RLS part will be different, as viewer users no longer exist in Power BI, permissions and RLS control is implemented in the application code and no longer in the Power BI service.

It is important to note that from tier F64 onwards, which is equivalent to Premium P1, you can now share reports with users who have a free account, directly through the Power BI portal (powerbi.com), without needing a license to view the reports.

On 01/15/2024, support for Copilot announced on Microsoft Fabric. This is Microsoft AI helping to improve the productivity of data science and engineering tasks and reduce potential errors.

What is Microsoft Fabric

The Fabric license gives you the following tools (all already included in the price):
– Possibility of embedding reports in third-party applications
– Transform your workspaces into PREMIUM
– Possibility to use the new Power BI connection mode: DirectLake
– OneLake (Microsoft integrated DataLake)
– Dataflow Gen2 – aka Power Query Online (No-code/Low-code ETL)
– Data Factory (No-code/Low-code ELT/ETL)
– Spark Notebooks (Python, Scala, SQL)
– Data Warehouses
– Data Lakehouses

If you are not familiar with Microsoft Fabric, click this link here and find out more.

Microsoft Fabric Free Trial

An interesting point about Fabric is that Microsoft releases a free trial period, for 60 days (which is often buggy and the time doesn't decrease as the days go by), so that you have access to the entire experience of using the tools that make up Microsoft Fabric, with unlimited access to everything.

You will have the opportunity to test all the incredible features that Fabric provides. Important: The evaluation resource is an F64, which costs 32 thousand reais per month, so it is an extremely powerful and powerful resource, and the performance during the testing phase using this F64 may not reflect your reality, if you plan to hire a smaller capacity such as F2, F4, F8, etc.

Fabric and Reserved Instance billing

This type of license is charged per hour it is connected (from R$ 1.03 per hour) and if it is paused, the billing stops. In fact, Microsoft collects the number of seconds that the resource was on in the month, convert it to hours and charge. Remember that when capacity is paused, users will NOT be able to access any reports from this workspace and updating datasets will fail.

THE API allows you to automate the pause/on process the resource and even increase or reduce capacity, depending on demand.

A big advantage of Microsoft Fabric licensing over Power BI Embedded is the ability to reserved instance, which is only available on Microsoft Fabric and is an annual contract, but with monthly payments, which reduces the monthly price of Fabric by 41%, and thus, makes the license a little cheaper than Embedded, for the same number of vCores. Remember that Power BI Embedded only “embeds” reports, while Fabric has several integrated tools.

When you activate the Reserved Instance, you make a 1-year reservation, which can be canceled or requested a prorated refund, subject to some defined rules. To learn about the refund process, use this link here.

With the reserved instance, you no longer need to pause/resume the capacity to try to save money, as Microsoft already gives you this 41% discount precisely so you don't have to turn the resource on and off. You still have the option to pause/resume, but you won't pause the billing and you'll pay the same amount whether the feature is on or off, so there's no point in thinking about pausing the feature.

It's worth remembering that if you have activated the reserved instance for F2, for example, and you want to increase the capacity for F4, you have a few options:
– Hire another F2 reserved instance, leaving you with 2, which together are equivalent to F4.
– Request a refund or cancel the F2 reserved instance, to hire an F4.
– Hire another F2 capacity in the pay-as-you-go model. In this format, you will pay for the F2 reserved instance normally and the other F2 instance, you will pay using the “Pay for Use” model.

IMPORTANT: From tier F64 onwards, free account users do not need a PRO license to view reports. But if you have purchased an F32 capacity and contract another F32, although the sum of the capacities is equivalent to F64, this unlimited report sharing functionality will NOT be activated in this way, just by having at least an F64 capacity or above.

Association with Workspaces

When you change a workspace to use an Embedded capability, your workspace becomes a PREMIUM workspace, including all the features you would have access to if you were using a Premium Per User workspace. The difference here is that even those with a PRO account can access the reports published in this workspace and enjoy all the benefits of a Premium workspace (in the PPU workspace, only users with a PPU license can access).

A workspace may or may not be associated with a capability (Premium, Embedded, Fabric, PPU). A capability can be associated with none, 1, or multiple workspaces. You can have multiple Embedded or Fabric capabilities in your organization, or even mix different types of capabilities.

To change the workspace association from Fabric to Embedded or vice versa, simply contract the desired capacity and change the Premium settings of the workspaces that will be migrated to the new contracted capacity. This process takes less than 1 minute per workspace.

Notes on capacity usage in this type of licensing:
– All reports will be processed by a single capacity that is associated with the workspace, meaning there may be a problem with resource usage concurrency.
– Updating datasets, processing DAX measurements, and rendering reports share the same capacity vCores.
– Many large models (> 150 MB) updating at the same time can overload capacity (which may be associated with multiple workspaces).
– Analysis Services can be a great support to take over the processing of DAX updates and processing instead of capacity.
– Large models using DirectQuery do not have data updates (they consume less capacity than Import mode).
– Capacity can be paused during non-usage times and increased to a higher tier during peak usage.

The way to contract for this license is through the Azure portal. There are significant differences between the price of the resource in Brazil and the USA. In Brazil, the same resource is almost 60% more expensive.

Capacity table

Capacity price table (amounts without taxes = 13.7%)

Features and Limitations

What you can do with this license:

• Download Power BI Desktop (always free, even without an account)
• Create reports, connecting to any data source
• Publish reports to your personal workspace and shared workspaces
• Share reports that use Premium features with users who don't even have a Power BI account
• Use data streaming
• Configure personal and enterprise data gateway to update local data up to 48x per day (for each dataset)
• Use tokens and API to embed unlimited reports in third-party applications
• Use the feature Publish to the web (CAUTION: Use ONLY with PUBLIC data. NEVER, EVER use this feature with private data)
• Subscription to report by email (Anyone receiving it needs a PRO or PPU account)
• Use the generate secure link feature to Insert report on Website or Portal
• Use Dataflows
• Access or create applications
• Use paginated reports
• Use incremental update
• Use datasets sizes up to 400 GB (F1024 or above)
• Have workspaces with sizes up to 100 TB
• Update datasets up to 48 times per day
• Use Incremental update of Dataflows
• Use hybrid tables (Import + DirectQuery)
• Use Datamarts
• Use XLMA Endpoint
• Use deployment pipelines (DevOps)
• Use integration with GIT
• Report subscription by email WITHOUT PRO or PPU account (Need to implement via code)

What you CANNOT do with this license:

• Users who will view the data DO NOT access the Power BI reporting portal. You will have to create or hire a portal to access the reports.

Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI Embedded

Both capabilities allow you to make reports available in Web applications legally, without having to pay a per-user license to view the reports and transform your workspace into PREMIUM, giving you access to several features that you don't have access to in a Workspace Pro, such as Datamarts, Deployment pipelines, Native integration with git, XLMA Endpoint, 48+ updates per day, etc.

The big difference between the two is that Fabric, in its smallest available capacity (F2), has 4x less processing power than Embedded's smallest capacity (A1), and therefore, you can start testing Fabric and its resources paying less than Power BI Embedded. But when compared in the same number of processing vCores, the cost of Fabric was 35% higher than that of Power BI Embedded, because Fabric offers many more resources and tools than Power BI Embedded, which “only” does this (Embed reports).

However, in November 2023, Microsoft released the feature reserved instance for Microsoft Fabric, a one-year contract that you purchase and which reduces the monthly price of Fabric by 41% and as a result, it ends up being a little cheaper than Power BI Embedded, when compared on the same number of vCores.

For comparison purposes, the smallest capacity of Power BI Embedded (A1 – 1 vCore) starts at R$3,550.96 per month (without shutdown), while Fabric (F2 – 0.25 vCore) starts at R$754.35 (without shutdown).

See more information about the comparison between capabilities on this link here.

When we compared the same capacity between Fabric (F8) and Power BI Embedded (A1), the value of Fabric before the reserved instance was higher, because Fabric is a complete data platform with many services and resources, one of which is the Embedded capacity, while Power BI Embedded serves only that purpose, but with the reserved instance, released in November/2023, this changed and Fabric ended up being cheaper than Power BI Embedded, when compared in the same way. number of vCores.

Can I use Power BI Pro or Premium per User for Embeddar?

Yes, it is possible to generate tokens to Embed reports in a Pro or Premium capacity per User, but depending on the official Microsoft documentation:

“Tokens embedded with Pro or Premium Per User License (PPU) are for development testing, so a Power BI Master or Service Principal account can only generate a limited number of tokens.

Acquire a capability for incorporation into a production environment. There is no limit to how many embedded tokens you can generate when purchasing a capacity.

In development testing, you can use free embedded trial tokens with a Pro license. To embed in a production environment, you must purchase a capability.”

Support materials

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So that's it, folks!
I hope you enjoyed this post and follow the series where I will explore all types of Power BI licensing!