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Resource Organization for Microsoft Fabric Landing Zones

Last updated: 02/27/2025

The resource organization design area establishes consistent patterns for organizing Microsoft Fabric resources within Azure. It ensures scalable, compliant, and manageable environments aligned with best practices for governance, domain architecture, and workload separation specific to Microsoft Fabric.

Overview​

Microsoft Fabric Landing Zones require careful planning of your resource structure to achieve the following goals:

  • Separation of duties: Isolate domains, workspaces, and environments using subscriptions and resource groups.
  • Scalability: Enable growth by assigning workloads to separate Fabric Domains, Capacities, and regions.
  • Compliance and policy enforcement: Use Azure Policy and Fabric governance tools to enforce naming, tagging, and configuration standards.
  • Operational clarity: Facilitate monitoring, cost management, and DevOps automation through structured Fabric resource topology.

This guidance focuses on Microsoft Fabric-specific requirements while building on Azure landing zone fundamentals.

Scope and Roles​

Involved Functions​

This design area involves:

  • Cloud Platform Team – defines base architecture and policies
  • Center of Excellence (CoE) – drives standardization and reuse
  • Fabric Solution Architects – design domain and workspace layout
  • Governance and Compliance – define mandatory conventions

Design Scope​

Resource organization decisions impact the following areas:

  • Fabric domain and workspace hierarchy
  • Subscription layout aligned with Capacities and domains
  • Resource group strategy for Fabric artifacts
  • Naming conventions tailored for Fabric constructs
  • Tagging enforcement for Fabric governance

Hierarchy of Scope​

Microsoft Fabric provides specific resource scoping layers to organize and govern assets effectively:

Scope LevelPurpose
DomainsLogical grouping of workspaces and capacities representing organizational or business units
WorkspacesCollaborative environments hosting Fabric items and data assets
OneLake ItemsData assets such as Lakehouses, Warehouses, and Dataflows stored within OneLake
Fabric ArtifactsSpecific Fabric resources like Lakehouses, Warehouses, Pipelines, and Reports

Subscription Strategy for Fabric​

Align subscriptions with Fabric Capacities, Domains, and team responsibilities. Common approaches include:

  • One subscription per Fabric Domain and environment: e.g., Fabric-Domain1-Prod
  • Dedicated platform subscription: for shared services like monitoring, identity, and network
  • Optional per-project subscriptions: when project-based isolation is required

Subscriptions should support Fabric-specific services such as:

  • Capacities (SKU-based resource allocation)
  • Workspace-scoped Fabric items
  • Region-specific workloads aligned with Fabric Domains

Use subscription democratization to delegate ownership and management where appropriate.

Resource Group Design​

Resource groups provide governance and lifecycle boundaries for Microsoft Fabric artifacts.

Recommendations:​

  • Create separate resource groups per environment and domain, e.g., rg-fabric-domain1-dev, rg-fabric-domain2-prod
  • Group Fabric artifacts by workspace or service type to align with DevOps and deployment pipelines
  • Structure resource groups to support automated deployments and governance controls

Fabric resources are often deployed and managed together, for example:

rg-fabric-domain1-prod
├── Lakehouse: lakehouse-sales
├── Warehouse: warehouse-sales
├── Pipelines: pipeline-transform-sales

Naming Convention​

Use consistent naming patterns to improve clarity and enforceability across Fabric resources.

Example Pattern:​

{domain}-{workspace}-{resourceType}-{env}-{region}

Examples:​

finance-analytics-lakehouse-prod-we
sales-marketing-warehouse-dev-ne
etl-data-pipeline-prod-we

Integrate naming validations using Azure Policy or deployment templates (e.g., Bicep, Terraform, or YAML files).

Tagging Strategy​

Tags enable cost management, governance, and reporting within Fabric environments. Apply tags at resource group and resource levels.

Tag KeyExample
domainfinance, sales
workspaceOwnerteam-data@company.com
envdev, test, prod
capacitySKUFabric-SKU1
dataSensitivityconfidential, public

Enforce mandatory tags using Azure Policy.

Multi-Region Considerations​

Microsoft Fabric supports geo-location of Capacities and data residency across OneLake regions.

Recommendations:​

  • Use regional identifiers in resource names and tags to reflect deployment location
  • Distribute Capacities and Fabric artifacts across regions for disaster recovery and compliance, e.g., westeurope, northeurope
  • Align data residency with Microsoft Fabric compliance requirements

Integration with Governance and Automation​

Ensure resource structures are enforceable and reproducible using Fabric-specific tools and Azure governance:

  • Use Fabric CLI and YAML deployment files for consistent provisioning of Fabric Domains, Workspaces, and artifacts
  • Use Azure Policy and Fabric governance artifacts like Purview to audit naming, tagging, and data policies across OneLake
  • Leverage Azure Resource Graph and Fabric monitoring tools for inventory, reporting, and compliance

Final Notes​

A clear resource organization model is foundational for scalable, secure, and efficient Microsoft Fabric Landing Zones. It ensures:

  • Domain and workspace isolation
  • Simplified access control and governance
  • Enhanced monitoring and cost allocation
  • Faster onboarding of new teams or projects

Visual Resource Organization Diagrams​

Fabric Resource Hierarchy​

Resource Group Structure​

Subscription Layout for Fabric Domains​

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