Nikola Ilic shares some thoughts:
I’ve already introduced Microsoft Fabric in the previous article, so if you’re still not sure what is it all about and why you can think of Fabric as your “data football team”, I strongly encourage you to check that article. Additionally, there are many great articles and videos, both from Microsoft and the community, where you can find out more about Fabric and its various scenarios and components.
In the above-mentioned article, I scratched the surface of the inevitable topic that now comes into focus: “What now for Azure Synapse Analytics?” Since I’ve been asked this exact question multiple times in the previous days, I’ve decided to put down my thoughts and share them in this article.
Read the whole thing. My thoughts, which are generally similar to Nikola’s:
- There are no plans (at this time) to remove Synapse, and even if there were, prior history—like with Azure SQL DW—says that the deprecation timeframe is something we can measure in years rather than months
- Fabric is intended to replace Synapse one of these days, and new customers should start with Fabric
- Current Synapse customers should stay on Synapse for now, especially given that there is currently no easy migration plan. Give partners and Microsoft some time to sort that out, though, and I expect you’ll see tools and products for this by the time Fabric goes GA
- PaaS and SaaS are quite different and that can be an influential factor. My personal preference is for SaaS, especially knowing how difficult it can be to secure Synapse while still enabling developer functionality
- We’re on day 4 of Fabric being a thing (at least in public), and it’ll probably be in a public preview for a while, so there’s still plenty of baking left to do