Microsoft Fabric and Azure data platforms in Aarau: architecture, capacity and cost

Microsoft Fabric is a genuine step forward and a genuine way to spend money quickly, and which one you get depends almost entirely on decisions made in the first fortnight.

This page is about building a data platform for an organisation in Aarau, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, Data Factory and the lakehouse patterns underneath them, with the local economy taken seriously. Aarau's base in public sector, industrial machinery and engineering, and insurance and reinsurance determines the data volumes, the latency requirements and the retention obligations, and those three things decide the architecture. The client population here is shaped by cantonal administration and machinery and electrical engineering.

Does a Aarau organisation actually need Fabric?

Look for a cluster rather than a single trigger: import refreshes that are getting uncomfortable, demand for SQL and notebooks against one copy, self-service across more than one team, retention that rules out a desktop model, or an existing Premium commitment. One analyst maintaining three import models that refresh in twenty minutes does not need a capacity, and buying one will not improve anything.

What the data actually looks like in Aarau

Public sector

Case and service data locked inside line-of-business systems with restrictive reporting modules, feeding statutory returns with precisely defined rules. Source systems typically include case management systems, finance and ERP, HR and payroll, GIS and gazetteers and grant management.

For a platform design, the consequence is specific. Returns are assembled by hand each cycle by a small number of experienced staff, concentrating risk in individuals. So the architecture has to make the raw grain replayable rather than aggregating at ingestion, and the first serving model should be a governed model that produces both the statutory return and internal performance reporting, so published and internal figures cannot diverge.

Professional and legal services

Time, billing and pipeline data where almost every meaningful figure is an allocation, and where confidentiality obligations constrain who may see matter-level detail. Four definitions of utilisation circulate simultaneously, so partner behaviour responds to whichever figure appears in the meeting they attend.

Systems to plan for: practice management system, time recording, professional services automation, CRM and finance system. Matter confidentiality and information barriers must be inherited by analytics through row-level security, not re-implemented loosely.

Industrial machinery and engineering

Project and configuration data as much as production data: engineered-to-order items, long lead times, and service revenue that outlives the original sale. Project margin is only known at completion, so loss-making contracts are discovered when it is far too late to act. Export control and dual-use classification data should be modelled explicitly where machinery is shipped outside the EU and UK.

A medallion layout for a public sector business

The medallion pattern is not complicated, and it is routinely implemented badly: a bronze layer that has already lost fidelity, a silver layer with no testable rules, and a gold layer that is really just the silver layer with different names. Here is how we would lay it out for a Aarau client in public sector.

Capacity sizing and what it really costs

Fabric capacity is billed by capacity unit. An F2 is roughly US$0.36 per hour pay-as-you-go, about US$260 a month, with around 40 per cent off for a one-year reservation. An F64, the smallest SKU at which report consumers no longer need an individual Pro licence, is roughly US$8,400 a month pay-as-you-go or around US$5,000 reserved.

The arithmetic that matters: F64 only becomes cheaper than per-user licensing somewhere in the region of 350 to 600 readers, depending on the discount you actually pay and whether you reserve capacity. Below that, Pro or PPU per user is normally the right answer, and buying capacity for prestige is a straightforward waste of money.

Capacity is sized from measurement, not from a spreadsheet. Each workload is profiled for its compute shape, for background refresh against interactive query, for concurrency and for when the peaks actually fall, then the result is checked on a trial capacity running your own data. The output is a sizing model that states expected utilisation at launch, at double the readers, and the specific point at which you would need the next SKU. Always price from the current Microsoft rate card for your region and agreement. Any figure in an article older than a quarter should be treated as an order of magnitude, not a quote.

Direct Lake, import or DirectQuery

Direct Lake reads Delta files in OneLake with no import refresh and no DirectQuery round trip, but unsupported constructs trigger fallback and performance then depends on the SQL endpoint. We test it against an import model on your own data and choose on the measured result. In practice Direct Lake tends to win on large, frequently landing tables, which public sector workloads often are, while import still wins on smaller models with heavy DAX.

Migrating from what you have now

Few Aarau organisations start from nothing. The realistic options are a serving-layer-first adoption, where Fabric takes the gold layer and reporting while existing engineering stays in place, or a domain-by-domain migration with the old platform retained until each domain is validated. What both have in common is that nothing is switched over in a single weekend. Single-weekend cutovers are what produce the rollbacks. The reference pipeline we build first is usually the system that hurts most, which here is normally case management systems.

Residency, latency and the Switzerland question

Switzerland North and Switzerland West give in-country residency, which matters more here than almost anywhere else in Europe: banking secrecy, professional secrecy obligations and client expectation all push Swiss data to stay Swiss. Verify per service, because not every Azure or Fabric feature is available in both Swiss regions.

For Aarau specifically, Switzerland North (Zurich) is the normal primary with Switzerland West (Geneva) as the pair. Latency from Aarau to that region is not usually a constraint for analytical workloads; the constraints that bite are feature availability per region and the processor chain your data protection officer will ask about.

• The revFADP brought Swiss law closer to the GDPR but not identical to it: records of processing, impact assessments and breach notification follow Swiss rules, and an EU-shaped compliance pack needs adapting rather than copying.
• FINMA outsourcing expectations require documented control over cloud providers, including the right to audit and a tested exit plan.
• Article 321 of the Criminal Code and sectoral secrecy duties restrict who may see client-identifying data, which has direct consequences for row-level security design.

Where to go next

If you are weighing a platform decision for a Aarau organisation, a workload assessment will answer it with evidence in two to three weeks, and the written recommendation is yours whatever you decide. Book a technical review.

We work across Switzerland and deliver into neighbouring markets regularly. Nearby pages worth reading if your group has sites elsewhere: Lucerne, Baden, St. Gallen, Olten, Zurich and Geneva.

Frequently asked questions