Power BI Premium Generation 2 (preview) was announced few months ago and offered substantial improvements in performance and scale to Premium subscribers. Today we are thrilled to announce that the 2nd generation of Power BI Embedded, referred to as Embedded Gen 2, is also available for its Azure subscribers to use during the preview period.
All of the Power BI Embedded Gen 1 capabilities such as pausing and resuming the capacity, are preserved in Gen 2 and the price per SKU remains the same, however the Gen 2 capacity resource provides the following updates and improved experience:
- Enhanced performance– Better performance on any capacity size, anytime. Operations will always perform at top speed and won’t slow down when the load on the capacity approaches the capacity limits.
- Greater scale – No limits on refresh concurrency, fewer memory restrictions and complete separation between report interaction and scheduled refreshes
- Lower entry level for paginated reports and AI workloads – Customers can start with an A1 SKU and grow as they need.
- Scaling a resource instantly – From scaling a Gen 1 resource in minutes, to scaling a Gen 2 resource in seconds.
- Scaling without downtime – Customers can scale an Embedded Gen 2 resource without experiencing any downtime.
- Improved metrics – Coming in a few weeks to simplify monitoring and metrics-based automation. Instead of various Gen 1 metrics, there will be one CPU utilization metric in Gen 2. In addition, a built-in reporting tool will allow customers to perform utilization analysis, budget planning and chargebacks.
How to get started
Customers can either create an Embedded Gen 1 or an Embedded Gen 2 capacity resource. During the preview period, they can run both types of Power BI Embedded capacities in parallel, and assign any Power BI workspace to either a Gen1 or a Gen 2 capacity, using the Groups AssignToCapacity API. Customers can create an Embedded Gen 2 capacity resource either in the Azure portal, or by using the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template (Azure CLI is not supported for Power BI Embedded Generation 2 (preview)).
Next Steps
We’ve created detailed documentation to help you navigate the public preview that we’ll continue to update throughout the process. You can learn much more about Power BI Embedded Gen 2 and how it works in the following docs:
Power BI Embedded Generation 2 (preview)
Create Power BI Embedded capacity
Embed paginated reports for your customers
The entire Power BI team is continuing to move full speed ahead to bring us from public preview to general availability. In the meantime, please leave us your feedback in the comments below and enjoy the public preview of Power BI Embedded Gen 2.
Watch this webinar: Best Practices for Deploying Power BI Embedded.