Bursting and Smoothing — Yin and Yang of the Fabric Capacity!

Learn about two key concepts that balance your Fabric capacity workload, and how to save money along the way!

Nikola Ilic
5 min readFeb 12, 2024
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The wait is over — Microsoft Fabric has been officially generally available since last November! If you want to learn more about the latest SaaS solution from Microsoft, I get you covered — go and read this article to understand all the details and nuances around Fabric.

I’ve also written an article about different pricing models for Fabric. One of these models, Pay-as-you-go, works in a slightly different way compared to the reserved instance pricing model. In the “pricing” article, I’ve mentioned two key concepts behind Fabric capacity workloads — bursting and smoothing.

Let’s try to break down these concepts and explain them as simple as possible:

Bursting lets you use more power than you purchased (within the specific timeframe)! Smoothing takes care that this power is “under control” within that same timeframe. Easy, right:)? I know, I know, so let’s break this further down…

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Nikola Ilic

Data Mozart — Make Music from your Data!| data-mozart.com | @DataMozart | Microsoft Data Platform MVP | Power BI Addict | Blogger, speaker, learner…