Microsoft Fabric Setup Guide

Before deploying data products, applications, or pipelines in Microsoft Fabric, it’s essential to set up a structured and governed environment. This setup guide introduces foundational capabilities to help you organize Fabric artifacts, manage access, establish billing control, and secure your environment according to your organizational and compliance needs.

These readiness steps align with the Fabric Adoption Framework and form the bridge between strategy and deployment. Where applicable, parallels to Azure landing zones are drawn to provide clarity for experienced cloud architects.

Fabric Setup Overview

Step	Description
Organize Fabric artifacts	Group and manage Fabric items (workspaces, dataflows, lakehouses, pipelines, etc.) to align with business domains, projects, or compliance requirements.
Select regions	Define Fabric capacity locations with regard to data residency, performance, and regulatory considerations.
Manage access	Apply workspace-level and item-level security using Microsoft Entra ID and role-based access.
Manage costs and billing	Set up and monitor Fabric capacities, define usage boundaries, and ensure clarity over SaaS-based capacity consumption and storage.
Plan governance, security, and compliance	Define policies, access boundaries, encryption configurations, and workspace lifecycles to ensure secure and compliant use of Fabric resources.
Monitoring and reporting	Use Microsoft Fabric and Azure Monitor to gain observability into usage, performance, and data lineage.
Stay current with Fabric	Establish release and change monitoring practices to stay informed on updates and prevent regression or feature-related disruption.

Recommendation: Establish a Fabric Landing Zone

Inspired by the Azure Landing Zone approach, Fabric environments can benefit from a pre-configured “Fabric Landing Zone” setup. This typically includes:

• A central platform workspace for shared artifacts like templates, policies, and pipelines.
• A capacity strategy for dev/test/prod separation.
• Git integration for deployment automation and versioning.
• Defined security model with Entra ID groups and workspace roles.
• Naming conventions, tags, and monitoring hooks for observability.

These foundational decisions accelerate adoption and reduce friction in multi-team or enterprise-wide scenarios.