Announcing the launch of Microsoft Fabric Quotas
On February 24, 2025, we launched Microsoft Fabric Quotas, a new feature designed to control resource governance for the acquisition of your Microsoft Fabric capacities. Fabric quotas aimed at helping customers ensure that Fabric resources are used efficiently and help manage the overall performance and reliability of the Azure platform while preventing misuse.
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive service that offers advanced analytics solutions through multiple workloads, all available in a single SaaS capacity model. Fabric is available through three offer types:
- Fabric free trial: a time-bound per-user trial providing a capacity with a given size to every trial user.
- Power BI premium (P SKUs): office-sold offers available as 12-month subscriptions. P SKUs are deprecated for most sales motions.
- Fabric capacities (F SKUs): Azure PAYG offers available in multiple SKUs (F2 – F2048).
This blog post introduces a governance feature for F SKUs called Microsoft Fabric Quotas.
What are Microsoft Fabric Quotas?
Fabric has capacity constraints within each region, necessitating the prioritization of paid customers. Additionally, we must safeguard our service against fraudulent activities that could exploit compute resources. To achieve this, we have implemented proposed limits on the resources a customer can access, based on the financial controls on the Azure subscription type.
Quotas are used by most major Azure services (compute / databases / Synapse Spark) for such prioritization of resources by limiting the number of resources available in a subscription.
Fabric quotas are only for F SKUs not P SKUs.
How do Fabric Quotas work?
Fabric Quotas limit the number of Capacity Units (CUs) a customer can provision across multiple capacities in a subscription. The calculation of the quota is based on:
- The subscription plan type (EA, PAYG, CSP, MSDN, etc.).
- The Azure region.
Each subscription owner/contributor can view their usage against their quota by typing in ‘Quotas’ in the Azure search bar and navigating to the Microsoft Fabric service.
Here is a walkthrough of this process:
Figure 1: Usage vs quota for a given subscription by region.
In the graphic, I have a quota of 320 CU in West Central US. I have two F64 capacities provisioned. My usage is 128 CUs (Quotas are independent of the state of your capacity, even paused capacities account for quota usage), and my remaining quota is 192 CUs. This means I can only provision up to an F128 in this region (or up to 192 CUs using an F128 and an F64). If I need to provision a larger capacity or scale up my capacity, I need to make a request to adjust my quota.
Figure 2: Request for increase in Fabric Quota.
Here I’ve made a request to increase by quota to 384.
Microsoft manages the upper limit for a quota request based on the Azure subscription type and region. Depending on my subscription’s upper limit, my request could be either approved or automatically rejected. If approved, I will see the following message.
Figure 3: Results of successful quota request.
If rejected, I will be able to submit a support request to increase my subscriptions limits (quota). For more details on the format of the support request refer to the documentation.
Quotas impact the following operations (1) scaling your capacity (2) provisioning a new capacity.
Refer to the documentation for the steps to manage your Fabric quota Microsoft Fabric Quotas documentation.
Summary
We believe that Microsoft Fabric Quotas will significantly enhance your experience with Microsoft Fabric, providing better resource management and ensuring optimal performance. We look forward to your feedback and are excited to see how you leverage this new feature to achieve your business goals.
