Updated: February 23, 2022 (November 26, 2020)

Power BI Back-end Hosting Overview

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Microsoft offers customers several Power BI back-end hosting options (listed in the accompanying diagram), including multiple online services and an on-premises Power BI Report Server. They vary on support for content types, client tools, features, performance, scaling, security, and licensing. Choosing the correct back-end hosting platform is key to meeting business requirements and controlling cost; however, choosing a Power BI hosting platform can be complex, and there is no one platform that meets all needs. Many customers find a hybrid deployment with on-premises and hosted components the only solution.

Repository and Functions

The back-end hosting platforms act as repositories for the following components:

Reports
Hosted datasets
Semantic and Power Query data models
Data integration pipelines.

They are also the workhorse for the following activities:

Authenticating users, applications, and data connections
Executing queries and controlling data refresh schedules
Pulling

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