from Hacker News

Fabric Is Just Plain Unreliable, and Microsoft's Hiding It

by ko_pivot on 5/19/25, 1:19 PM with 12 comments

  • by rootsudo on 5/19/25, 4:26 PM

    Yep, this is common - especially for monday mornings where jobs failed on Thursday/Friday. Said department would run to IT/Cloud computing team to see what was going on - and it always led to an instant ticket because nothing was wrong and the status page did not reflect accurately the service outage.

    Reddit usually was the only place that reported an outage, the o365 support twitter is dead now, and the staus page per tenant is reporting is unreliable because they are manually updated.

    AFAIK the SLA for fabric/PowerBI does fall under M365 if you have it.

  • by flexagoon on 5/19/25, 11:12 PM

    Just in case someone else also had no idea what Microsoft Fabric is: it seems to be some sort of integrated platform for data processing and analysis with AI features (because of course there's AI)

  • by everdrive on 5/19/25, 4:54 PM

    Microsoft seems to just be expanding rapidly, and not worrying too much about feature parity, compatibility, or reliability. Why did our logic app fail last night? No reason, just Azure hiccups. Why doesn't the Sentinel data connector work? Whoever maintains it doesn't care. etc.

  • by datadrivenangel on 5/19/25, 4:42 PM

    Fabric will be great in 5 years, but right now it tends to be unreliable, unergonomic, and surprisingly expensive.

    As a data consultant, I will help you make use if it, but I will not advise you to adopt it if you can avoid it.

  • by BrentOzar on 5/19/25, 10:07 PM

    Author here - whoa, didn’t expect this to hit HN. Here for any questions, but I think the post speaks for itself.

  • by dexwiz on 5/19/25, 7:48 PM

    I wonder if this is a difference in mindset of OLAP vs OLTP. I have worked with OLAP teams where they were dropping millions of records, and the solution was usually just restream the data and shrug. But if any service backed by OLTP was dropping writes, its all-hands-on-deck incident with detailed postmortems and exec meetings.

  • by Centigonal on 5/19/25, 4:37 PM

    (I haven't been hands-on with Fabric (I've used ADF and PowerBI pre-Fabric), and I work for a company that sometimes works with Fabric competitors, so I am biased.)

    From our experience with customers, Fabric feels like a rebrand of existing Azure services, plus a few new beta services that Microsoft is aggressively selling to their customers as fully baked. I've heard two customer stories this year where they migrated ETL to Fabric and then had to scramble to migrate again because of latency or reliability issues.

    I suspect Fabric will be pretty dang good a few years from now, and that it's probably a great option today for users who accurately understand its strengths and weaknesses, but I think the way some MS sales teams are selling the platform to customers right now is dishonest and harmful.