If you’ve bought a P1 reserved capacity, you may have been told “No worries – it’s the same as an F64!” (Or really, this is probably the case for any P to F sku conversion.) Just as you suspected – that’s not entirely accurate. And if you are trying to create Fabric shortcuts on a storage account that uses a virtual network or IP filtering – it’s not going to work.
The problem seems to lie in the fact that P1 is not really an Azure resource in the same way an F sku is. So when you go to create your shortcut following all the recommend settings (more on that in a minute), you’ll wind up with some random authentication message like the one below “Unable to load. Error 403 – This request is not authorized to perform this operation”:
You may not even get that far and just have some highly specific error message like “Invalid Credentials”:
Giving the benefit of the doubt – you may be thinking there was user error. There are a gazillion settings, maybe we missed one. Maybe, something has been updated in the last month, week, minute… Fair enough – let’s go and check all of those.
Building Fabric shortcuts, means you are building OneLake shortcuts. So naturally I first found the Microsoft Fabric Update Blog announcement that pertained to this problem: Introducing Trusted Workspace Access for OneLake Shortcuts. That walks through this EXACT functionality, so I recreated everything from scratch and voila! Except no “voila” and still no shortcuts.
Okay, well – no worries, there’s another link at the bottom of the update blog: Trusted workspace access. Surely with this official and up-to-date documentation, we can get the shortcuts up and running.
Immediately we have a pause moment with the wording “can only be used in F SKU capacities”. It mentions it’s not supported in trial capacities (and I can confirm this is true), but we were told that a P1 was functionally the same as an F64 so we should be good right?
Further down the article, there is a mention of creating a resource instance rule. If this is your first time setting all of this up, you don’t even need this option, but it may be useful if you don’t want to add the Exception “Allow Azure services on the trusted services list to access this storage account.” to the networking section of your storage account. But this certainly won’t fix your current problem. Still, good to go through all this documentation and make sure you have everything set up properly.
One additional callout I’d like to make is the Restrictions and Considerations part of the documentation. It mentions: Only organizational account or service principal must be used for authentication to storage accounts for trusted workspace access. Lots of Microsoft support people pointed to this as our problem, and I had to show them not only was it not our problem, but it wasn’t even correct. It’s actually a fairly confusing statement because the a big part of this article is setting up the workspace identity, and then that line reads like you can’t use workspace identity to authenticate. I’m happy to report using the workspace identity worked fine for us once we got our “fix” in (I use that term loosely) and without the fix we still had a problem if we tried to use the other options available for authentication (including organizational account).
After some more digging, on the Microsoft Fabric features page, we see that P SKUs are actually not the same as F SKU in some really important ways. And using shortcuts to an Azure Storage Account that are set using anything but to Public network access: Enabled from all networks (which BTW – is against Microsoft best practice recommendations) is not going to work on a P1.
The Solution
You are not going to like this. You have 2 options. The first one is the easiest, but in my experience very few enterprise companies will want to do this since it goes against Microsoft’s own best practice recommendation: Change your storage account Network setting to: Public network access enabled from all networks.
Don’t like that option? You’re probably not going to like #2 either. Particularly if you have a long time left on your P SKU capacity. The solution is to spin up a F SKU. In addition to your P SKU. And as of the writing of this article, you can not convert a P SKU to an F SKU, meaning if you got that reserved capacity earlier this year – you are out of luck.
In our case, we have a deadline for moving our on-prem ERP solution to D365 F&O (F&SCM) and that deadline includes moving our data warehouse in parallel. Very small window for moving everything and making sure the business can still run on a new ERP system with a completely new data warehouse infrastructure.
We’d have to spend a minimum of double what we are paying now, 10K a month instead of 5k a month, and that’s only if we bought a reserved F64 capacity. If we wanted to do a pay-as-go, that 8K+ more a month, which we’d probably need to do until we figure out if we should do 1 capacity, or multiple (potentially smaller) capacities to separate prod/non-prod/reporting environments. We are now talking in the range of over 40K additional at a minimum just to use the shortcut feature, not to mention we currently only use a tiny fraction of our P1 capacity. I can’t even imagine for companies that purchased a 3-year P capacity recently. (According to MS, you could have bought that up until June 30 of this year.)
Ultimately many companies and Data Engineers in the same position will need to decide if they do their development in Fabric, Synapse, or something else all together. Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft can figure out how to convert that P1 to an F64. Like STAT.
Data Work Mom 