Stark InformaticsMicrosoft Fabric consulting
Enterprise data platforms, architected on Microsoft Fabric.
Stark Informatics designs the architecture, runs the migration, governs the estate, and right-sizes the capacity — then hands the platform to your team with the documentation to operate it.
A free thirty-minute architecture review. No cost, no obligation.
- 01Microsoft Fabric specialists
- 02Publishers of Lakewarden
- 03Senior-led delivery
- 04Free 30-minute review
01What we get called about
Fabric problems are rarely Fabric problems.
They are decisions made in the first month, discovered in the twelfth. Four patterns account for most of the estates we are asked to review.
The estate grew faster than the design
Fabric is trivially easy to start and expensive to reorganize. Workspaces multiplied per team, capacity was assigned ad hoc, and the medallion layers mean three different things depending on who you ask.
Capacity spend has no owner
The bill grows and nobody can attribute it. Without consumption mapped to a workspace, an item, and an accountable owner, one badly written notebook and an entire business domain look identical, and the only lever left is a larger SKU.
Nobody can prove the numbers
Two reports disagree, lineage stops at the dataset boundary, and the reconciliation happens in a spreadsheet before the meeting. Adoption does not fail loudly — people quietly go back to exporting to Excel.
One person can fix it
The logic lives in unreviewed notebooks, failures are discovered by the business, and reprocessing is a manual operation performed nervously. The platform works, but it is one resignation away from not working.
Every one of these is an architecture decision that was cheap in week one.
That is the work we do — and it is why the first conversation is a free thirty minutes rather than a proposal.
02What we do
Six practices. Most engagements use two or three.
Each is a defined body of work with named deliverables, not a rate card with a job title on it. Open any of them for the detail.
Fabric is trivially easy to start and expensive to reorganize. Workspace sprawl, ad-hoc capacity assignment, and an undefined medallion contract are cheap to fix in week one and structural by month twelve. We design the platform before we build it.
- Workspace and domain topology
- Capacity sizing against real workload profiles
- Medallion contract with ownership at every layer
- OneLake shortcuts and mirroring strategy
- Security and tenancy model
- Development to production promotion path
03Reference architecture
What we build, and what wraps around it.
Source systems through to the semantic layer, with governance, security, operations, and delivery treated as part of the architecture rather than a program that follows it.
Governance
Purview catalog, lineage, glossary, sensitivity labels, and data quality gates at every medallion boundary.
Security
Entra identity, workspace roles, row and object level security, private networking, and tenant policy baseline.
Operations
Orchestration, structured run logging, alerting, capacity monitoring, chargeback, and quarterly right-sizing.
Delivery
Git integration, deployment pipelines, environment parameterization, and reviewable promotion to production.
03Layer
OneLake
A single logical lake in open Delta Parquet. Every Fabric engine reads and writes the same tables, which removes the copy-per-tool pattern that makes reconciliation impossible and storage costs compound.
04Our product
We don’t only consult on Fabric. We ship on it.
Access, capacity, refreshes, connections, and tenant change — a whole Fabric estate in one console, signed in with your own Microsoft identity.
We designed it, we build it, and we publish it. Everything on this page comes from running Fabric estates — Lakewarden is what we built once we had solved the same three problems by hand often enough.
Built from the practices above
- Retention
- Years of audit, metrics, and daily snapshots — against 14 to 30 days natively
- Compute
- Runs outside your capacities, so monitoring Fabric costs no CU
- Identity
- Delegated Entra sign-in. Calls go straight to Microsoft's APIs and data stays in your tenant
Lakewarden is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
05How we work
Review, architect, build, harden, transfer.
The sequence is deliberate. Each step is only as good as the one before it, and the last one is the point of the other four.
Review
A free thirty-minute conversation about your current estate, what you are trying to reach, and whether Fabric is genuinely the right answer. No deck, no pitch.
Architect
Workspace and domain topology, medallion structure, security model, and capacity plan get decided while they are still cheap to change. Documented and reviewed before anything is built on top of them.
Build
Delivery in two-week increments against a defined backlog. Pipelines are idempotent, models are version controlled, and every increment ends with something your team can see running.
Harden
Logging, alerting, access review, cost controls, and a validated recovery path. Migrations are reconciled against the source system before anything is retired.
Transfer
Knowledge transfer is scheduled work, not a document dropped on the last day. The engagement ends with your team operating the platform without us.
06Free consultation
Thirty minutes. No cost, no deck.
We look at the architecture you have today, what you are trying to reach, and whether Microsoft Fabric is the right platform for it. If it is not, we will say so — a more useful outcome than a proposal you should not sign.
What we cover
- 01Your current estate, and where the friction actually is
- 02Where Fabric fits in it — and where it does not
- 03The architecture decisions that are cheap now and expensive later
- 04What a realistic first ninety days would involve
What you leave with
- 01A straight answer on whether Fabric is the right platform for you
- 02The risks worth knowing about before you commit to anything
- 03A sense of sequence and effort, with no obligation to use us
Based in
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Working with teams across the United States