Koos van Strien hits us with an interesting thought about SSAS versus Power BI:
As I’m currently planning to migrate the entire BI architecture of one of my customers to the cloud, this made me think: can we ditch SSAS as we know it already in favor of Power BI? What are the alternatives?
To study that, I’ve put some diagrams together to show the possibilities of moving BI to the cloud. First, I’ll discuss the possible architectures, then the impossible architecture (but maybe the situation I was looking for).
One man’s opinion: there will be SSAS for Azure. I have no proof of this, and the nice part about having no proof is that I can throw out wild speculation without fear of violating NDA…. But to me, Power BI solves a different problem and acts in conjunction with SSAS rather than as its replacement. I also don’t see any technical reasons why SSAS couldn’t live in the cloud, and so that leads me to believe that it will be there eventually. But hey, it turns out wild speculation is occasionally wrong…