- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube. And in this video, I wanna break down the number one question that I've received since the Microsoft Fabric
public preview announcement and that is how much does it cost? And you know what are
the licensing options? So they announced a blog post that actually talked about
the licensing pieces. This dropped on June 1st and goes through what your options are for the new Fabric capacities, talks about OneDrive storage, and other items that will be
in play. But what I want to do is I want to just kind
of walk down the line and just kind of reset everyone so we know what we're talking about from that licensing perspective. So this includes the new Fabric capacities and also what's going on with the stuff that we knew about before. First and foremost, these new Fabric capacities
kind of have two options. The first one is available today and this is the Pay as You Go option. And so you can go to the Azure portal and you can create a Fabric capacity. Enough all this talking, you know we like to do
it here in Guy in a Cube. Let's do what? Let's head over to my machine. All right, I'm gonna jump
over to the Azure portal. You can see here that I
have a Fabric capacity. This is the F2 SKU. And so what we can do is if
we just go to a resource group I can create and type in Fabric and we can see the
Microsoft Fabric capacity. So let's go and create. What'll happen is that we
can give it a capacity name and you can choose the
size that you want here from F2 all the way up to F2048. So to put this in perspective, if you know anything about
Power BI premium capacities a P1 SKU is the equivalent
of an F64 Fabric SKU. They changed up some of the core counts or the capacity units that are available. So the Premium P1 SKU
used to have eight cores. Now it is capacity units. And so there's 64 capacity
units for a Fabric capacity. And from there you can do the math and figure out what's available. So that means that there are SKUs that are below what was available
on the Power BI side now and there is a SKU that's above what the Premium P5 SKU was. There's also a Reserved Instance option that will come later in the year. And that Reserved Instance
from a pricing perspective will be the equivalent of what you can pay for a Power BI Premium capacity today. Okay, so that's the main
piece of the Fabric capacities but you have different
capacity options today. Let's head over to the Power BI portal. This gives you a great view of what are all of the
options available to you. So if I go to capacity settings, you'll see that we have Power BI Premium. These are the capacities
that have been available for a while now. So this is Power BI Premium Gen2. The Power BI Premium capacities provide all of the new
Fabric capabilities. So if that's what you currently have, good job, you're in the game. Think of a Power BI Premium capacity as that reserved instance, right? But this is something you can purchase from the Microsoft 365 side as
opposed to the Azure portal. We've got Power BI embedded. So these are the A SKUs that were available on the Azure sides. These are still available. You can purchase these, you can get these from the Azure portal for embedding purposes. However, just know that these only provide
Power BI capabilities. These do not provide
the new Fabric workloads that are available. So you either need to be on
Power BI Premium capacities or the new Fabric capacities
that are available in Azure. The nice thing is those Fabric capacities, they are available at those equivalent A SKU tiering as well. And actually you can go a
little bit below that now with Fabric capacities. There is a caveat on the
Power BI content side of it but I'll cover that in a little bit. But just know that if you are on a Power
BI embedded SKU today you can actually just move over to a Fabric capacity in the Azure portal and you're good to go. We've got trials that
are available as well. So I did a separate video
talking all about trials. This provides you a full
Fabric capacity 60-day trial at the F64 capacity unit SKU. These are freely available. And then lastly, we'll also
see the Fabric capacities withinside of the Fabric portal. Again, you create these
on the Azure portal side and then you have options there
for what SKU that you want. Okay, that's cool, we've
got these Fabric capacities, but what happened to
the Power BI licensing and is that's still a thing? The answer is yes. There was a Power BI free
license that was available. This allowed you to get into the portal. Combined with Power BI Premium capacities you could actually do large
scale deployment for users without needing a Power BI Pro license. Power BI free license has been renamed to Microsoft Fabric Free. If you had Power BI Free
in your organization and users were assigned to it that now shows Microsoft Fabric free. It's the same thing. It gets you into the portal and lets you just look around and whatnot. You'll have access to My Workspace, you can create content
withinside of My Workspace, but you can't share or
do anything like that. Power BI Pro is still
available at $10 a month US, and that allows you to
create Power BI content. So it doesn't let you do anything from a Fabric content
creation perspective, but this will actually allow
you to create Power BI reports, share those with other Power BI Pro users. From a Fabric perspective, even if you have a Fabric capacity, if you want to create Power BI reports you still are required to
have a Power BI Pro license. So if you want to create
that Power BI report, you need to have a pro license regardless of what capacity
is backing the workspace. The Fabric capacities and
Power BI Premium capacities will allow you to create
Lakehouses, Warehouses, Dataflows Gen2, all of those things without
needing a Power BI Pro license because those have been
elevated to Fabric workloads and those are just
covered by the capacity. From a report consumption perspective, as long as you're on a Fabric
capacity, F64 SKU, or higher, or you're on Power BI Premium, free users can consume content without needing a Pro license. If you are below and you want
to consume Power BI reports inside of the Fabric portal, you will still be required to
have a Power BI Pro license. Power BI Premium per
User is still available. That is set at $20 US a month and this allows you Premium
capabilities at a reduced cost for not needing a Power
BI Premium capacity or a Fabric capacity. You can create that Power BI content and you can do those items that were labeled as
Power BI Premium before, so deployment pipelines,
things of that nature. I did see a lot of questions about, "Is Power BI Premium per User
still even relevant here?" And the answer is, I think yes because there are
scenarios where customers just wanna take advantage
of the Power BI capabilities and not necessarily the
broader Fabric capabilities. This is an option for you,
it's a lower priced tier and you can still have some
of those Premium capabilities. So for small organizations this could still be
really valuable for you. Circling back to the pricing blog that was mentioned on June 1st, it did talk about the Pay as You Go option and it also talked about
the Reserved Instance option that'll be coming later this year. However, it also mentioned another thing that was interesting. It talked about storage costs for OneLake. So this means that there will
be extra costs for storage. And if you think about this, you know that data storage could get quite large especially if you're taking full advantage of OneLake and Lakehouses,
things of that nature. The blog post did call out,
it will be similar pricing to Azure Data Lake storage costs. It did not list out specific
pricing for OneLake storage. However, I did see a
comment from Amir Netz talking about the fact that there will be storage
that comes with the capacity. So you're not gonna get
charged immediately, but if you go over that storage limit, you'll be charged for that overage. The thing that has not been released yet is what is the storage that
comes with the capacity and how much will that storage cost? So stay tuned on those items,
it has not been announced yet. So once the OneLake
storage piece has dropped we'll do a whole video on that. Another common question I hear
is, "Well, what about GCC?" So this is the government
cloud on the US side and GCC has always been in this weird spot where, you know, it's kind of bridged between commercial and government cloud and so a lot of those
customers are kind of stuck. Typically what happens is
capabilities for government cloud comes after general availability. So preview items don't typically make it into government clouds. So there are a couple things that I know that are coming in the future, so hopefully in the next couple months or towards the end of the year or towards whenever we get
to general availability. So the first thing I wanna mention is that right now if you
get a Fabric capacity and, or you're playing
with any of the workloads even on Power BI Premium those Fabric workloads, so we're talking about
Lakehouse, Warehouse, Dataflows Gen2, you're not being charged
CPU cycles or compute cycles for those items currently. So you can use those
without incurring any cost. This is to really help you
understand the workloads understand what is the
need for these items over and above what you
have today with Power BI. And in the Capacity Metrics app you'll be able to actually break out what is preview load
versus non preview load. So you can actually see
what is that going to be. You will start incurring that
compute cost on August 1st so be aware of that. So between now and August
1st this is a great time to actually start testing workloads, seeing out what the load is, what the compute cost is, before you actually incur that cost and potentially get throttled as a result. It was already mentioned but Fabric capacity Reserved Instances will be coming later down
the road later this year. So be aware of that and that
will come at a reduced cost. It was also mentioned that there is a Planning
Calculator in the works, and so a lot of people have asked, "How much capacity do I need?" And that's always been a
hard question to answer. It depends on so many factors. Once it gets dropped, we'll
do another video on that to see how it helps you with planning your capacity
usage in your organization and other things to think about. I already mentioned the
OneLake storage cost and you know what that is going to be, how much storage actually
comes with your capacities. That information will be
coming out later this year so I will keep you up
to date on that front. All right, that was a
whirlwind of information about what the current state is for licensing and costs
and things of that nature. Let me know in the comments if you have any other
questions about this, happy to answer you. I will keep you updated
as I get more information and we'll have updated videos as well. This one's specific for the
initial public preview release but stay tuned for more information. And if you wanna learn more
about Fabric just in general, check out this playlist where
I'm gonna get you started with Microsoft Fabric
and keep you up to date. As always, thank you so much for watching. Keep being awesome, and we'll
see you in the next video.
