Idea / Problem As Fabric pipelines evolve “beyond ETL” into long‑running, human‑aware workflows (per the recent blog post “Pipelines are evolving beyond ETL”), the current connection model is becoming a serious operational risk in real data engineering environments. Many pipeline activities now require Fabric connections that are: Identity‑bound and opaque Not discoverable by the rest of the team Not traceable to the pipelines that use them Not safely editable or replaceable by another engineer This creates hidden single points of failure. If the original author is unavailable (holiday, sickness, turnover), production pipelines can become unfixable. This might be acceptable for individual or business‑user scenarios, but it is not safe for team‑owned, production‑grade data engineering. Why this matters In professional data engineering: Pipelines are team‑owned assets Any engineer must be able to support failures Ownership cannot be implicit or personal Governance and auditability are mandatory Fabric currently conflates data‑plane connections (e.g. Copy sources/destinations, which work well) with delegated/action connections (e.g. Approval, Invoke Pipeline), even though they have very different operational requirements. Requested improvements At minimum, Fabric needs: Workspace‑ or team‑owned connections (not tied to individuals) Ability to see where a connection is used Safe rotation, replacement, and deletion Clear distinction between data‑plane and delegated/action connections Support for service principals / managed identities for workflow actions (e.g. Approvals) Without this, teams will be forced to avoid newer pipeline capabilities in production, despite their potential value. Expected benefits Addressing this would: Make Fabric pipelines safe to operate as team‑owned production assets Reduce hidden single points of failure caused by person‑bound connections Improve supportability during incidents, on‑call, and staff absence Enable broader use of newer pipeline capabilities without increasing operational risk Align Fabric more closely with enterprise data engineering, governance, and audit expectations This would allow Fabric to evolve beyond ETL without compromising the safety and reliability that professional data engineering environments require.
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