Do I need the same capacities for our Production and Development environment?

[FerryTechnical]

Is it necessary to use the same capacities for the Development and Production environment?

[tayloramy]

Hi @FerryTechnical, 

As others have mentioned, you should ideally use seperate capacities so that you don't accidently blow up production. 

I've also found that forcing development work to be on smaller capacities like an F4 or F8 pushes developers to be more efficient as if they are not efficient they blow up their dev environment. 

If you found this helpful, consider giving some Kudos. If I answered your question or solved your problem, mark this post as the solution.

[svenchio · Accepted solution]

HI @FerryTechnical , the topic of Fabric Capacity administration is extremely interesting and you’ll find plenty of recommended patterns out there. Ultimately, you need to choose the one that best fits your needs from two key perspectives: technical and financial. Let me start by addressing your question…

The answer is No, quite the opposite in fact! It is STRONGLY SUGGESTED to separate Dev from Prod capacities for these reasons:

• Isolation of workloads: Dev activities (experiments, heavy refreshes) won’t impact production SLAs.
• Performance stability: Production gets guaranteed compute resources without interference.
• Cost control: You can size Dev smaller (e.g., F2 or F4) and Production larger (e.g., F64 or P1+) based on usage.
• Governance: Easier to apply different security and compliance policies per environment.

I think this MSFT article tackles quite nicely Plan your Microsoft Fabric capacity: Strategic guide overview  all you need to know, in particular to support your question, I think part 2 is particularly useful. 

Well, ther you go, the topic is quite extensive so, if you have additional questions, reach out! I would appreciate a thumbs-up and you accept this as solution to your question ... all the best 

[KarinSzilagyi]

Hi @FerryTechnical, typically dev capacities are smaller than Prod capacities since you usually work with smaller data sets, just big enough to test functionality.  

Depending on the size of your project and company + team and working hours you can even pause your dev/test capacities when not in use to further cut down on costs.

[wardy912]

Hi @FerryTechnical 

 No, it is actually better to use a different capacity for your production environment, you don't want issues in Dev/Test to affect your end users!

 For more info, please watch my video on capacity management:

https://youtu.be/SmQ7FqMu0No?si=ktd7iolIXuJUV3vA

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I hope this helps, please give kudos and mark as solved if it does!

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[svenchio]

Hi @wardy912  I justed to say that I saw your video explaining capacities and I LIKED IT SO MUCH! It was an amazing work putting togheter so much useful information, I'll using as a reference moving forward ... BIG THANKS and kudos to you mate 😁  ... all the very best. 

[wardy912]

Thank you @svenchio,

really glad you found it useful, more coming in the new year!