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Select Microsoft Fabric Regions

Choosing the right Azure region is a foundational decision when adopting Microsoft Fabric. Regional selection directly influences compliance, latency, performance, and availability—particularly because Fabric services like OneLake, Fabric Capacity, and Real-Time Intelligence are bound to specific regions. In multi-tenant and distributed organizations, aligning these services correctly avoids costly architectural missteps.

✅ Best practice: Your Microsoft Fabric Capacity, associated OneLake storage, and Dataverse Mirroring features must reside in the same Azure region to ensure low-latency data access, supported service capabilities, and compliant data processing.

Additional Fabric-specific considerations​

  • Latency: Real-time streaming, Direct Lake mode, and semantic models in Power BI all benefit from regionally co-located capacities.
  • Compliance: Data sovereignty regulations (e.g., in the EU, CH, or US) may require data at rest to remain within specific boundaries. Fabric OneLake follows the Azure regional compliance framework.
  • Performance: Interactive analytics and GenAI scenarios require proximity to both data and compute. Deploying Fabric capacity close to end users and workloads improves query response times and load performance.

Fabric Deployment Planning with Regions​

  • Fabric Capacity is provisioned per region and defines the scope of performance and scale.
  • Workspaces created within a Fabric Capacity must reside in the same region.
  • Each workspace consumes from the capacity and inherits region-based limitations and benefits.

Refer to our Data Mesh Introduction for broader architectural principles, particularly for decentralized data ownership across regions.

Region Pairing and Multi-Region Design in Microsoft Fabric​

For enterprise scenarios requiring high availability, data residency in multiple jurisdictions, or global low-latency access, a multi-region Fabric design may be appropriate. While Microsoft Fabric does not yet support native geo-replication of OneLake or Fabric Capacity, Azure region pairing offers strategic value:

  • Azure Region Pairs ensure that in the event of a large-scale outage, paired regions are recovered with priority.
  • Use region pairing to define your disaster recovery strategy—for example, provisioning secondary capacities and backup pipelines in the paired region.

💡 Tip: While workloads cannot currently fail over automatically in Fabric, strategic use of region-paired capacities and deployment automation can support manual or semi-automated DR scenarios.

Recommendations for Multi-Region Fabric Architecture​

  • Align OneLake and Capacity regionally per workload or domain.
  • Use Azure Policy to restrict deployment to allowed regions.
  • Plan for asymmetric DR: prioritize critical workspaces for multi-region deployment.
  • Leverage Dev/Test environments to validate region-specific performance or compliance behavior.

Refer to the Azure region pairs documentation for up-to-date pairings and recovery commitments.

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