Skip to content
CSA Loom — the Microsoft Fabric experience for Azure tenants where Fabric isn't yet available: lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, semantic models, Activator rules, Data Agents, across Commercial, GCC, GCC-High, and DoD IL5

For Azure Government (GCC)

GCC = Microsoft 365 GCC tenant + Azure Commercial subscriptions. Identity stays in GCC boundary; Azure subs are in Azure Commercial.

What "GCC" means here

Layer Where it lives
Microsoft 365 tenant M365 GCC (community gov cloud)
Azure subscriptions Azure Commercial (public Azure)
Compliance FedRAMP High + DoD IL2 (Azure Commercial baseline)

Per docs/fabric-in-gov-cloud.md, this is the most-common federal configuration for customers who don't have strict DoD IL4/IL5 requirements. ITAR-eligible workloads should NOT use GCC — they require GCC-High.

Prerequisites

Item Notes
Azure Commercial subscription paired with your M365 GCC tenant az account show --query tenantId should match your GCC tenant
Region Any Azure Commercial US region (eastus, westus, eastus2, etc.)
Power BI Premium P-SKU (P1 minimum) — NOT F-SKU; F-SKU is unavailable in GCC Power BI admin portal
Other prereqs same as Commercial baseline See Commercial deployment

Critical GCC limitations

Per research/02-gov-boundary-availability.md §7.5:

  • ❌ Power BI F-SKU not supported in GCC — EM + P SKUs only
  • ❌ Direct Lake unavailable in GCC even when Fabric Gov ships — structural gap (F-SKU is the gate)
  • ❌ Azure Maps visual in Power BI not available
  • ❌ BYO ADLS Gen2 storage in Power BI not available
  • ❌ Autoscale in Power BI not available

Everything else works the same as Commercial (Azure stack is identical).

Deploy

Use gcc.bicepparam:

az deployment sub create \
  --name csa-loom-gcc-$(date +%s) \
  --location eastus \
  --template-file platform/fiab/bicep/main.bicep \
  --parameters platform/fiab/bicep/params/gcc.bicepparam \
  --parameters adminEntraGroupId=<group-guid>

gcc.bicepparam sets: - fabricEnabled = false (no F-SKU) - directLakeEnabled = false (no F-SKU) - powerBiSku = 'P1' (or P2, P3 — EM/P only) - purviewUnifiedCatalogEnabled = false (GCC cert lag)

Everything else matches Commercial.

Direct Lake parity in GCC

Not available. Use one of:

  1. Power BI Premium P-SKU Import semantic model — refreshed on schedule (not commit-triggered like Direct-Lake-Shim)
  2. Power BI DirectQuery against Databricks SQL Warehouse — always live, slower DAX
  3. Composite TMDL — Import for dims + DirectQuery for facts

The Direct-Lake-Shim service deploys but is disabled in GCC (it requires F-SKU to refresh via XMLA-Direct-Lake-compatible endpoint).

Compliance posture

  • FedRAMP High (Azure public baseline)
  • DoD IL2 (Azure public baseline)
  • HIPAA BAA via Microsoft Product Terms
  • StateRAMP-aligned

Customer responsibility: workload-level compliance + audit (CIS benchmarks, NIST 800-53 control implementation).

Forward migration

When Fabric reaches GCC (Fabric Gov pair): - F-SKU still unavailable in GCC; Fabric Gov F-SKU only in GCC-H/DoD - Loom + Fabric Gov hybrid less compelling for pure-GCC customers (no Direct Lake either way) - Consider migrating to GCC-High if Direct Lake matters