Azure Synapse to Fabric Migration: What Changes After Moving to Microsoft Fabric?
In the era of organizations becoming more modern in their analytics environment, a few organizations are reviewing how they can streamline data engineering, warehousing, reporting, and AI workloads. Azure Synapse to Fabric Migration is an option for companies aiming to progress towards Microsoft Fabric's unified analytics architecture. But migration isn't just moving from one platform to another. It has the potential to transform the way teams operate data pipelines, run analytics workloads, manage data governance, report on data, and day-to-day.
Why are Companies Transitioning to Microsoft Fabric?
Azure Synapse has enabled enterprises to use enterprise data warehousing, enterprise data integration, big data processing, and analytics. Many of these capabilities are integrated into a single SaaS-based analytics platform with Microsoft Fabric.
Fabric can be used by organisations to:
- Make it easier to analyze data
- Minimize data workloads outside of the application.
- Connect an analytics or Power BI closer to the business.
- Enhance integration of the data and BI teams.
- Develop robust fields for AI innovations.
- Automate and simplify platform management.
The business case is based on the organization's current Synapse architecture, workloads, amount of data, and modernization goals.
What changes are made to the Data Architecture?
One of the most significant changes is the shift towards One Lake, MSFT's new single data lake for Fabric. Orgs can leverage One Lake as a single data platform across various analytics workloads, rather than having to deal with multiple data stores.
In addition, Fabric gives the concept of a shared workspace in which teams can collaborate using a variety of analytics capabilities, including:
- Data Engineering
- Data Factory
- Data Warehouse
- Data Science
- Real-Time Intelligence
- Power BI
This can help to decrease the number of different services groups that should be handled.
What will happen with Data Pipelines?
It is important to review existing Synapse pipelines prior to migration.
Organizations should identify:
- Data sources
- Pipeline dependencies
- Transformation logic
- Scheduling requirements
- Authentication methods
- External integrations
Fabric Data Factory offers data integration and pipelines, but it's possible that the migration will not be the same as copying each of the existing components. To determine which pipelines can be migrated with minimal changes, and which pipelines should be modernized during the migration, a proper assessment should be made.
Data Warehousing – changes
For any organization relying on SQL pools that are used exclusively for their warehouse workloads, they must consider how they can adapt their current warehouse workloads to fit Fabric's data warehouse capabilities.
This includes reviewing:
- SQL queries
- Stored procedures
- Tables
- Views
- Performance requirements
- Data loading processes
- Workload dependencies
Some workloads will need to be migrated the same way; others will not. For businesses, selecting workloads for refactoring can help more effectively leverage Fabric's architecture.
Power BI is getting closer to the business of the government and municipalities.
The near integration of Fabric with Power BI is one of the key benefits of the platform.Data engineering, warehousing, analytics, and reporting can be integrated into one place with the help of organizations. This can be useful to bring the data teams closer to business users.
The benefit for leadership teams is that they can quickly gain access to trusted dashboards and analytics without having to deal with multiple disconnected reporting layers.
So, what are the changes for Data Teams?
The migration may also have an impact on the way data professionals do their jobs.
Teams can leverage a wider fabric environment, rather than run multiple separate analytics services.
While data engineers can work on pipelines and architecture of the lakehouse, analysts and BI developers can have closer interaction with the same underlying data.
This presents the opportunity to improve collaboration, but additionally, teams need to be trained on the Fabric tools, architecture, governance and operating model.
Even in an era of increased automation and “smart” devices, governance and security remain vital.
There is no reason why good governance won't continue to be important in Fabric.
Organizations need to have well-defined policies on the following:
- Workspace management
- Data access
- Identity and permissions
- Sensitive information
- Data lineage
- Compliance
- Monitoring
Governance should be a part of the migration plan, not post-migration.
If you're looking to successfully move to a new site, be sure to follow these tips.
A well-thought-out migration strategy can minimize risk.
1. Assess
Delineate the current Synapse environment, workloads, and dependencies, as well as the business-critical reports.
2. Prioritize
Define workloads with the highest potential of business value, or with the highest modernization potential.
3. Pilot
Transfer a representative application to Fabric and test its performance, features and usability, as well as cost.
4. Modernize
Redesign workloads to take advantage of the architecture of Fabric, as well as its long-term approach over replicating the old environment.
5. Validate
Validate the accuracy, security, performance and reports, pipelines, and business processes of tests.
6. Scale
If the pilot is successful, then roll out more workloads in incremental stages.
Conclusion
Moving from Synapse to Fabric can create a more unified analytics environment, but successful modernization requires careful assessment and planning. Organizations need to evaluate their data architecture, pipelines, warehouse workloads, Power BI reports, governance, and user requirements before migration. Working with a microsoft fabric implementation partner can help businesses assess existing Synapse workloads, develop a practical migration roadmap, modernize critical data processes, and reduce the risks associated with moving to Microsoft Fabric.
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