Microsoft Fabric makes it wonderfully easy to put many analytics workloads on one platform. Power BI, data engineering, warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, Copilot, and other experiences can all share the same Fabric capacity. That is a big advantage, but it also creates an architectural question that does not get much attention until something goes wrong: what should you actually do when a capacity starts running out of room? The answer is not always “buy a bigger capacity.” Sometimes you should optimize, sometimes scale up, sometimes scale out, and sometimes isolate the workload causing the problem.
Read on for an explanation of what it means to “run out of capacity” and a quick overview of four options available to you.