In this post I want to cover the current state of Microsoft Fabric workloads. As per the below diagram that I created.
In reality, there has been a lot of changes to workloads since the Microsoft Fabric announcement at Microsoft Build 2023 two years ago. Including the release of various new workloads and the rebranding of Real-Time Intelligence.
I want to raise awareness about these changes for various reasons. Including the fact that I see a lot of outdated diagrams being shown. Along the way I share plenty of links.
Current state of Microsoft Fabric workloads
I published my first post about Microsoft Fabric two years ago. Where I covered how to spread your SQL Server wings with Microsoft Fabric.
In that post I showed a table covering all the different workloads. Which back then were known as experiences.
As part of that post I created a table that covered all the workloads. So I decided to create an updated version of that table for this post.
Microsoft Fabric workloads provided by Microsoft
 | Data Factory to ingest data using either Data Pipelines which are based on Azure Synapse Analytics Pipelines or Dataflows Gen2 which are based on Power Query. |
 | Data Engineering for those who want to work with Lakehouses at scale by utilizing Spark compute and notebooks. Which is similar to experiences that are on offer in other services that work with Spark compute. |
 | Data Warehousing which allows you to work with a powerful compute engine based on a serverless SQL relational engine. Allowing you to manipulate and query large amounts of data with T-SQL. |
 | Real-Time Intelligence, formerly knows as Real-Time Analytics. Which provides a complete streaming solution inside Microsoft Fabric based on Kusto. Including a KQL Database engine and a capability called eventstream. Which can be used to ingest streaming data. As part of the rebranding the icon had a change of color. Note how similar the color is to the former Data Activator workload. Which is now part of the Real-Time Intelligence workload and is simply known as Activator. |
 | Data Science capabilities. Including the ability to work with experiments and machine learning models within a Microsoft Fabric workspace. I highly recommend checking out Data Wrangler. Which recently had some new AI-powered capabilities added. |
 | Power BI to deliver Business Intelligence. Which is the same as before, only not due to a lot of optimizations and innovations. One of which is Direct Lake mode. Which allows Power BI to read large amounts of data quickly. |
 | Industry solutions is one of the newer workloads to appear in Microsoft Fabric. Which allows you to deploy templates into your Microsoft Fabric workspace to speed up the delivery of various industry solutions. For example, when working with the Sustainability data solutions in Fabric you can deploy the ESG metrics capability. In order to create Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics. |
 | Databases is the newest workload that Microsoft has introduced into Microsoft Fabric. This workload caters for transactional databases. Including SQL database in Fabric and Mirroring in Fabric. Plus, Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric was announced during Build 2025 and is currently in private preview. |
More workloads
In my diagram at the start of this post I indicated that there are also more workloads available now.
Which is now possible because you can either add additional workloads developed by vendors or if you are a Microsoft partner you can develop your own with the Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit.
You can see the additional workloads available to yourself by clicking on the “Workloads” icon in Microsoft Fabric.
Personally, I think this opens the door for some interesting possibilities.
Final words
I hope that this post helps raise more awareness of the current state of Microsoft Fabric workloads. Plus, I really hope that it encourage others to update their Microsoft Fabric diagrams.
Of course, if you have any comments or queries about this post feel free to reach out to me.
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