Guide to Power BI Architecture

Introduction

In the previous article we had a detailed introduction to what actually Power BI is and how it is used. In this section we are going to discuss a new topic and an important one to kick-start the Power BI journey. Here, we will discuss Power BI Architecture, its components and the Power BI Service architecture. So let’s start.

What is Power BI Architecture?

Power BI architecture consist of 4 major sections that starts right from Data Sourcing to the creation of reports and dashboards. If we observe various technologies and processes are working together to get the desired outcome with correct accuracy. This is the reason Power BI is among the market leader when it is about Reporting and Dash boarding tools.

Sourcing of Data: Power BI can extract data from various data connectors. It can be servers, Excel Sheets, CSV files, other databases and many more. You can even extract live data or a streaming data in Power BI. The extracted data is directly imported in Power BI within few seconds and is compressed up to 1 GB. After sourcing of data you can perform Data Transformation operations.

Transforming the data: As we know the Golden Rule of Data Analytics that before analyzing or visualizing the data we have to clean the data to get the accurate insights. So in this step Data Cleaning and Pre-processing takes place. After transforming data, the data is loaded into data warehouse and further analysis takes place.

Creating Reports or Visualizations: After data transformation process, different data reports and data visualizations are made based on the business requirements. A particular report has various visualizations of the data with different filters, graphs, charts, diagrams, etc.

Creating Dashboards: Planning and arranging all elements of Power BI report makes a Power BI Dashboard. Dashboards are created after publishing the reports in Power BI service. 

Working of Power BI Architecture

The Power BI architecture is mainly divided into two parts: 

1. On-cloud
2. On-premises

The below diagram is also called as Power BI Data Flow diagram that may help you to clearly understand the flow of data from On-premises to On-cloud server applications.

On-premises

All the reports published in Power BI Report Server are distributed to the end users only. Power Publisher enables to publish Power BI reports to Power BI Report Server. Report Server and Publisher tools by Power BI helps to create datasets, paginated reports, etc.

On-cloud

In this Data flow diagram, Power BI gateway acts as a bridge in transferring data from on-premises data sources to on-cloud servers. The clouds consist of various stuffs such as datasets, reports, dashboards, embedded, etc. 

Power BI Service Architecture

It is mainly based on two clusters they are mainly:

1. The Front-end Cluster
2. The Back-end Cluster

The Front-end Cluster

The front-end cluster behaves as a medium between the clients and the on-cloud servers. After the initial connection and authentication the client can interact with various datasets available.

The Back-end Cluster

The back-end cluster manages datasets, visualizations, data connections, reports, and other services in Power BI. These Components are mainly responsible for authorizing, routing, authentication and load balancing.

Here, we have completed the architecture part behind the Power BI and in the next article we will study about some of the “7 Important Rules” that we need to remember to become pro in Power BI. 

I hope you liked and understood the write-up. Meet you all soon in the next blog. Stay tuned and Happy Learning !!