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What is a Fabric Landing Zone?

A Fabric Landing Zone is the foundational environment in Microsoft Fabric where data products and analytics solutions are governed, deployed, and operated. Inspired by the concept of Azure Landing Zones, a Fabric Landing Zone defines the organizational, operational, and architectural patterns needed to deliver scalable and secure analytics workloads within Microsoft Fabric.

Unlike Azure, Fabric does not rely on subscriptions and management groups. However, it introduces its own hierarchy of organization:

Conceptual Model of Fabric Landing Zones​

Fabric Landing Zones typically follow two patterns, adapted from Azure:

  • Platform Landing Zone: Contains shared services like capacity reservations, governance policies, workspace templates, cost management, audit logging, and access control.
  • Application/Data Product Landing Zones: These are dedicated workspaces (or sets of workspaces) for specific projects, domains, or business units. They host analytical artifacts such as Lakehouses, Warehouses, Semantic Models, Pipelines, and Reports.

These landing zones can be aligned with a Data Mesh architecture, enabling domain-driven ownership and federated governance.

Benefits of a Fabric Landing Zone​

  • Scalability: You can scale by allocating different capacities to different business units or workloads.
  • Security & Governance: Policies, RBAC, sensitivity labels, and monitoring can be applied consistently across workspaces.
  • Cost Management: Separation by Capacity and Workspace enables cost attribution and optimization using tools like the Performance Report and Cost Allocation tools.
  • DevOps & Automation: Integration with Git repositories and pipelines ensures a consistent and auditable deployment process across environments (Dev, Test, Prod).

AI Workloads in Fabric​

Fabric Landing Zones are designed to support AI workloads (e.g., Copilot for Power BI, Azure OpenAI embedded models in Notebooks). These can be deployed within the same landing zones as traditional BI and data engineering solutions, with appropriate governance guardrails.

Accelerators and Templates​

To speed up the deployment of Fabric Landing Zones:

  • Use Workspace templates for standardized governance and layout.
  • Use Azure CLI or GitHub Actions to script the creation of workspaces, assign capacities, configure security, and set up artifacts.
  • Consider Shared Capacities for exploration and innovation, and Dedicated Capacities for production workloads and noisy-neighbor isolation.

🚀 Coming soon: Template repository for Fabric Landing Zones aligned with the Fabric Adoption Framework.

Contributors