Beyond markdown: Shareable sites with Rayfin (Preview)
If you work alongside AI tools, your screen is probably full of markdown files. They’re fast to write, easy for an agent to read, and great for keeping a record. Then you try to share one. That’s where the format breaks. You paste it into a chat and the formatting collapses. You email the file and someone replies asking if it’s the latest version. You convert it to a deck and spend an hour fixing layout. By the time three people have weighed in, four copies are floating around with no clear source of truth. A new sharing pattern is emerging Outside the enterprise, a different pattern is catching on. Instead of sending a doc, people describe what they want and an agent ships a small hosted site. The recipient gets a URL. The URL stays stable. Updates show up the next time someone opens it. No re-sharing, no version sprawl, no file attachments. It’s a better fit for how AI-era work actually moves. Once content is dynamic and partially generated, keeping it in a static file creates friction every time you update it. Why the consumer version doesn’t fit at work The pattern works at home. At work, it usually doesn’t. Internal content needs identity. It needs access controls. It needs an audit trail. The underlying data needs to stay inside the organization’s data estate. A hosted site that lives in some third-party tenant, with its own auth and its own database, is exactly the kind of thing security teams have spent years trying to consolidate. That’s the gap Rayfin closes. What Rayfin changes Rayfin is a new open-source SDK and CLI that lets you (or a coding agent working on your behalf) define an application backend in code and deploy it to Microsoft Fabric. The deployed site runs as a first-class Fabric item and inherits the platform’s identity, access policies, governance, and compliance. For the markdown-to-site workflow, that translates to a few practical things: One URL per piece of content, and that URL stays the same as you iterate. Access is governed by the same Fabric controls as the underlying data, so sharing with your org is a configuration, not an integration. The site’s data ultimately lands in a SQL database in Fabric, so anything the page captures is available in OneLake for Power BI, notebooks, and other Fabric workloads without a separate pipeline. The shift is small to describe and large in practice. You stop attaching files. You start sending links. The link is current the next time someone opens it. See it in action To make this concrete, here is a sample I built with Rayfin (it took about 5 minutes, end-to-end): a quarterly business review for Zava, a fictional direct-to-consumer retailer. It started as a markdown review and became a hosted site with one stable URL, company sign-in, and metric tiles, agenda sections, and feedback that gets stored in a SQL database. Figure: The Zava Business Review app showing the FY27 Q1 title, a row of metric tiles for net revenue, orders, average order value, conversion rate, and repeat customer rate, and a Revenue and growth section with a feedback thread Everything on the page is served behind a single Fabric URL, and access follows the workspace permissions. The full source is on GitHub, and you can deploy your own copy in a few minutes with the Rayfin CLI or by handing the repo to a coding agent like GitHub Copilot. The Zava Business Review sample repo includes the code and step-by-step instructions. Next steps Read the Rayfin announcement from the Fabric team. Learn how Fabric apps use SQL database in Fabric. Explore the Rayfin GitHub repo. Build your first app and follow the Rayfin deployment docs. Share feedback in the comments on the announcement post.
