⚙️ Tutorial 00: Environment Setup¶

Last Updated: 2026-04-15 | Version: 2.0 Status: ✅ Final | Maintainer: Documentation Team

🏠 Home > 📖 Tutorials > ⚙️ Environment Setup

For the 5-minute version, see docs/QUICK_START.md.

📖 Overview¶

This tutorial walks you through setting up the complete Microsoft Fabric environment for the Casino/Gaming POC. By the end you will have a workspace, three Lakehouses following the medallion architecture, and a verified Spark environment ready for data ingestion.

graph LR
    subgraph "What We're Building"
        A[Azure Subscription] --> B[Fabric Workspace]
        B --> C["lh_bronze — Raw Data"]
        B --> D["lh_silver — Cleansed Data"]
        B --> E["lh_gold — Business KPIs"]
    end

🎯 Learning Objectives¶

By the end of this tutorial you will be able to:

• Verify your Fabric capacity is running and ready
• Create and configure a Fabric workspace
• Create three Lakehouses for the medallion architecture
• Understand why Bronze / Silver / Gold layers exist
• Run a test notebook and confirm Spark connectivity
• Set up local development tools for data generation

📋 Prerequisites¶

Before starting, confirm you have:

🛠️ Step 1: Verify Fabric Capacity¶

Your Fabric capacity must be Running before any notebooks or data processing will work. A paused or deallocated capacity will silently prevent everything downstream.

Check capacity state¶

1. Open the Azure Portal
2. Search for Microsoft Fabric and open your capacity resource
3. Check the Status field on the overview blade:

Verify from the Fabric portal¶

1. Open app.fabric.microsoft.com
2. Click Settings (gear icon, top right) > Admin portal
3. Navigate to Capacity settings
4. Confirm your capacity appears and shows Active

If you don't have Admin portal access, ask your tenant admin to confirm capacity status, or check the Azure Portal method above which only requires Contributor access on the capacity resource.

Checkpoint: Capacity status is Running / Active.

🛠️ Step 2: Create Workspace¶

1. In the Fabric portal left navigation, click Workspaces
2. Click + New workspace
3. Configure:

1. Click Apply

Configure workspace settings¶

After the workspace is created:

1. Open workspace settings (click the three dots ... next to the workspace name > Workspace settings)
2. Under General, set the contact list to include your team
3. Under License info, confirm Fabric capacity is selected

Pin the workspace to your favorites (star icon) for quick access from the home page.

Checkpoint: casino-fabric-poc appears in your Workspaces list with a diamond/capacity badge.

🛠️ Step 3: Create Lakehouses¶

The medallion architecture uses three layers to progressively refine data. Each layer gets its own Lakehouse:

graph TB
    subgraph "Medallion Architecture"
        direction LR
        B["lh_bronze<br/>Raw, append-only<br/>Minimal transformation"] --> S["lh_silver<br/>Cleansed, validated<br/>Schema-enforced, deduped"]
        S --> G["lh_gold<br/>Business aggregations<br/>Star schema, KPIs"]
    end

Create each Lakehouse¶

For each of the three Lakehouses:

1. In the casino-fabric-poc workspace, click + New > Lakehouse
2. Enter the name (lh_bronze, then lh_silver, then lh_gold)
3. Click Create

Verify¶

Your workspace item list should now show:

casino-fabric-poc/
  lh_bronze
  lh_silver
  lh_gold

Each Lakehouse will have empty Tables and Files folders — that's expected at this point.

Checkpoint: All three Lakehouses appear in the workspace.

🛠️ Step 4: Connect External Storage (Path A Only)¶

🔀 Which path are you on?

	Path A — Production-Aligned	Path B — Quickstart
Prereq	Deploy infra/main.bicep first	Fabric capacity + workspace only
Data location	ADLS Gen2 → OneLake shortcut	Upload directly to OneLake
Source path in notebooks	Files/landing_zone/...	Files/raw/...
Cost	~$1-3/day (Purview + Storage + KV + LAW)	Fabric capacity only
Best for	Production patterns, governance, security tutorials	Learning medallion flow fast

Path B users: Skip this step entirely — proceed to Step 5. Upload your generated data directly to lh_bronze/Files/raw/<source>/ via the Fabric UI.

Path A users: Complete this step to connect your Bicep-provisioned ADLS storage.

If you deployed the ADLS Gen2 storage account via Bicep, connect it as a shortcut to avoid copying data.

1. Open lh_bronze in the workspace
2. In the Explorer pane, right-click on Files
3. Select New shortcut > Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
4. Enter your ADLS DFS endpoint URL and authenticate with your organizational account
5. Browse to the landing container
6. Name the shortcut landing_zone and click Create

Shortcuts let you query external data in place without copying it into OneLake, saving storage cost and keeping data in sync.

Checkpoint: The landing_zone shortcut appears under Files in lh_bronze, and you can browse its contents.

🛠️ Step 5: Configure Workspace Access¶

1. Open workspace settings > Access
2. Add team members with appropriate roles:

Be careful with Admin — Admins can delete the entire workspace and all its contents.

🛠️ Step 6: Install Local Tools (Optional)¶

For local data generation and development, set up Python:

Python environment setup¶

Run these commands in a terminal from the repo root (Suppercharge_Microsoft_Fabric/):

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv .venv

# Activate — Windows
.venv\Scripts\activate

# Activate — macOS / Linux
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install project dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Verify installation¶

# Should print without errors
python -c "import pandas; import pyspark; print('Dependencies OK')"

All python and pip commands in this tutorial series assume you have activated the virtual environment first.

✅ Step 7: Verify the Environment¶

Run a test notebook in Fabric¶

This test writes and reads a Delta table to confirm Spark and Lakehouse connectivity.

1. In the casino-fabric-poc workspace, click + New > Notebook
2. In the notebook's Lakehouse explorer (left panel), click Add and attach lh_bronze
3. Paste this code into the first cell and click the Run button:

# ---- Run this in a Fabric Notebook (attached to lh_bronze) ----

# Create test data
data = [("environment", "ready"), ("setup", "complete")]
df = spark.createDataFrame(data, ["key", "value"])

# Write to Bronze Lakehouse as a Delta table
df.write.format("delta").mode("overwrite").save("Tables/test_connection")

# Read it back to confirm round-trip works
df_check = spark.read.format("delta").load("Tables/test_connection")
print(f"Row count: {df_check.count()}")  # Should print: Row count: 2
display(df_check)

print("Environment verified successfully.")

First-time execution takes 2-3 minutes while Fabric provisions a Spark cluster (cold start). Subsequent cell runs in the same session are fast.

1. After the cell succeeds, verify test_connection appears under Tables in the Lakehouse explorer (you may need to click the refresh icon)
2. Clean up by running this in a second cell:

# ---- Run this in a Fabric Notebook ----
spark.sql("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS test_connection")
print("Test table cleaned up.")

Checkpoint: The test cell printed Row count: 2 and the table appeared in the explorer.

✅ Validation Checklist¶

Before proceeding to Tutorial 01, confirm every item:

• Fabric capacity is Running / Active
• Workspace casino-fabric-poc exists with Fabric capacity assigned
• Lakehouse lh_bronze created
• Lakehouse lh_silver created
• Lakehouse lh_gold created
• Test notebook executed successfully (Row count: 2)
• Test table cleaned up
• (Optional) ADLS shortcut landing_zone working
• (Optional) Local Python environment with dependencies installed

🔧 Troubleshooting¶

Workspace and Capacity¶

Notebooks and Spark¶

Local Development¶

Pro Tip: If Spark startup fails repeatedly, try detaching and reattaching the Lakehouse to the notebook — this forces a fresh cluster provisioning.

🎉 Summary¶

You have successfully:

• Verified your Fabric capacity is running
• Created the casino-fabric-poc workspace
• Set up the medallion architecture with lh_bronze, lh_silver, and lh_gold
• Confirmed Spark connectivity with a test notebook
• (Optional) Connected external ADLS storage and set up local dev tools

Your environment is ready for data ingestion.

📚 Resources¶

• Microsoft Fabric Documentation
• Lakehouse Overview
• Workspace Management
• OneLake Shortcuts
• How to Use Notebooks

🧭 Navigation¶

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