Buy a Microsoft Fabric subscription

This article describes the differences between the Microsoft Fabric capacities, and shows you how to buy an Azure SKU for your organization. The article is aimed at admins who want to buy Microsoft Fabric for their organization.

After you buy a capacity, you can learn how to manage your capacity and assign workspaces to it.

SKU types

Microsoft Fabric has an array of capacities that you can buy. The capacities are split into Stock Keeping Units (SKU). Each SKU provides a different amount of computing power, measured by its Capacity Unit (CU) value. Refer to the Capacity and SKUs table to see how many CUs each SKU provides.

Microsoft Fabric operates on two types of SKUs:

• Azure - Billed per second with no commitment. To save costs, you can make a yearly reservation.

• Microsoft 365 - Billed monthly or yearly, with a monthly commitment.

Azure SKUs

Azure SKUs, also known as F SKUs, are the recommended capacities for Microsoft Fabric. You can use your Azure capacity for as long as you want without any commitment. Pricing is regional and billing is made on a per second basis with a minimum of one minute.

Azure capacities offer the following improvements over the Microsoft 365 SKUs.

• Pay-as-you-go with no time commitment.

• A capacity reservation. This feature allows you to reserve a capacity for a specific period of time, and save money on your Azure bill. A reserved capacity is no longer charged at the pay-as-you-go rates.

• You can scale your capacity up or down using the Azure portal.

• You can pause and resume your capacity as needed. This feature is designed to save money when the capacity isn't in use.

• Microsoft Cost Management.

• Azure Monitor Metrics.

Buy an Azure SKU

To buy an Azure SKU, you need to be an owner or a contributor of an Azure subscription. If you do not have access to these roles in a subscription, you can ask your Azure subscription administrator to create a custom role with the following Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) permissions:

• Microsoft.Fabric/capacities/read
• Microsoft.Fabric/capacities/write
• Microsoft.Fabric/capacities/suspend/action
• Microsoft.Fabric/capacities/resume/action

To buy an Azure SKU, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. In Azure, select the Microsoft Fabric service. You can search for Microsoft Fabric using the search menu.

3. Select Create Fabric Capacity.

4. In the Basics tab, fill in the following fields:

   • Subscription - The subscription you want your capacity to be assigned to. All Azure subscriptions are billed together.

   • Resource group - The resource group you want your capacity to be assigned to.

   • Capacity name - Provide a name for your capacity.

   • Region - Select the region you want your capacity to be part of.

   • Size - Select your capacity size. Capacities come in different stock keeping units (SKUs) and we measure them by capacity units (CUs). You can view a detailed list of Microsoft Fabric capacities in Capacities and SKUs.

   • Fabric capacity administrator - Select the admin for this capacity.

     • The capacity administrator must belong to the tenant where the capacity is provisioned.
     • Business to business (B2B) users can't be capacity administrators.

5. Select Next: Tags and if necessary, enter a name and a value for your capacity.

6. Select Review + create.

Microsoft 365 SKUs

Microsoft 365 SKUs, also known as P SKUs, are Power BI SKUs that also support Fabric when it's enabled on top of your Power BI subscription. Power BI EM SKUs don't support Microsoft Fabric.

Related content

Microsoft Fabric licenses