Understand your Fabric Operating Model

Operating in Microsoft Fabric opens new dimensions of agility, governance, and shared responsibility across teams. Fabric is not only a SaaS platform but also a strategic architecture that impacts how data products, analytics, and governance are delivered. While many principles from traditional cloud operating models apply, Fabric introduces a need for alignment around digital assets, multi-tenant structures, workspace boundaries, capacity management, and decentralized ownership.

This section of the Fabric Adoption Framework explains how to define and evolve your Fabric operating model. We build upon the foundational ideas from traditional cloud environments but extend them with considerations specific to Microsoft Fabric.

What is a Fabric operating model?

A Fabric operating model defines how your organization governs, manages, and supports data and analytics workloads within Microsoft Fabric. It addresses how teams coordinate across:

• Workspaces and Artifacts: Including Lakehouses, Warehouses, Pipelines, Notebooks, Dataflows, and Reports
• Capacity Management: Including multi-capacity design, usage patterns, and cost allocations
• Access and Roles: Including Power BI Admins, Fabric Admins, Workspace Admins, and their scope of control
• Governance and Compliance: Aligning with policies, regulatory constraints, and data classification
• Automation and Deployment: Managing Git integration, deployment pipelines, and lifecycle workflows

How is a Fabric operating model different?

Unlike traditional cloud IaaS/PaaS platforms, Fabric abstracts infrastructure. Instead of managing compute or storage directly, you're governing digital assets and their execution patterns across a shared SaaS backbone. This introduces a unique emphasis on:

• Data Mesh principles: Encouraging domain ownership and decentralized stewardship
• Governance through policy and permissions rather than infrastructure segmentation
• Shared capacity usage and usage-based billing, requiring transparency and accountability
• Workspace hierarchy that serves as the new boundary for ownership and lifecycle

For an introduction to how Data Mesh fits into Fabric, see Data Mesh Introduction.

Key focus of this section

This section helps you define your Fabric operating model by answering questions like:

• How should roles and responsibilities be distributed across workspaces and domains?
• How should platform and domain teams collaborate?
• What policies and tools should be used to enforce governance at scale?
• How do you balance autonomy with consistency across decentralized teams?

We provide comparisons of operating models, implementation patterns, and guidance for organizing your Fabric landscape effectively.