Hello Everyone,
I'm working with a customer using a Fabric PAYG capacity. They typically run their capacity for only a few hours per day, yet experience unexpected spikes in CU consumption at pause/resume time.
The Problem:
Background operations are smoothed over a fixed 24-hour window. This works well for Reserved Capacities that run continuously, but creates an unfair billing situation for PAYG customers who pause their capacity.
Example:
Customer runs an F32 capacity for 1 hour
A background job consumes 11,500 CUs (10% of the hourly F32 budget)
With 24h smoothing, only 11,500 ÷ 24 = ~480 CUs are "repaid" during that 1 hour of uptime When the capacity is paused, the remaining ~11,020 CUs become billable overages, even though the F32 had enough capacity to fully absorb the job within that hour
Proposed Enhancement:
Allow PAYG customers to configure the smoothing window (e.g., 1–24 hours) or provide an option to disable smoothing entirely. This would let customers who run short capacity windows properly utilize their provisioned CUs without losing capacity to the 24-hour smoothing assumption.
Reserved capacity customers benefit from 24h smoothing because their capacity runs continuously. PAYG customers, by design, start and stop their capacity—yet the current smoothing mechanism penalizes this usage pattern.
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