Migrating Azure Data Factory pipelines to Fabric directly from your Fabric workspace

Microsoft Employee

3 months ago

Migrating Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines to Fabric has traditionally started in the ADF portal—running assessments and then switching to Fabric to complete the process. This approach continues to support scenarios where upfront readiness insights are important.

Now, we’re introducing a Fabric-first migration experience that lets you start and complete migrations directly within Fabric—reducing context switching and simplifying the process, while still supporting assessment-driven flows when needed.

How it works

Open your Fabric workspace and select Migrate from the toolbar. In the Migrate to Fabric panel, under Migrate to notebooks, Spark pools, and more, select Data Factory.

Figure: The Migrate panel in a Fabric workspace with the Data Factory option highlighted.

You’re prompted to choose the Azure Data Factory instance you want to mount. Mounting (Azure Data Factory Item) creates a read-only reference to your ADF in the Fabric workspace—nothing moves, and nothing changes in your factory until you explicitly start migration.

Figure: Selecting an Azure Data Factory instance to mount from the Fabric workspace

After mounting completes, select Migrate to Fabric (Preview) from the mounted factory. From here, the experience is the same regardless of which entry point you used:

Select pipelines — Select individual pipelines or select them all. Each pipeline shows its readiness status.
Map connections — The tool auto-creates Fabric connections for supported authentication types: account key, SAS, service principal, and workspace identity across Azure Blob Storage, ADLS Gen2, SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Data Explorer, Cosmos DB, and several others. For unsupported connection types, link to an existing Fabric connection or create one from workspace settings.
Migrate — Selected pipelines migrate into a folder prefixed with the source factory name_Migration for easy identification and to avoid name collisions. Activities tied to unmapped connections are deactivated—you can configure them later.

What happens after migration

Pipelines land in your Fabric workspace with schedule triggers disabled by default. Before switching production workloads, validate in a non-production environment:

Check that all supported connections resolve and authenticate correctly.

Re-enable and configure triggers.

Run end-to-end tests to confirm pipeline behavior matches ADF.

When to use each entry point

Use the entry point that best matches your scenario. If you want a comprehensive assessment of pipeline readiness before migrating, start from Azure Data Factory. If you already know which factory you want to migrate and prefer to stay entirely within Fabric, start from your Fabric workspace.