No Pause on the Azure Data Factory

Using only what you need in Azure is a crucial part of optimizing your environment in the cloud. You find that as attractive as Azure is for the masses, making this change to make sure what you do use is optimal will make it downright irresistible.

Many customers, as they are ramping up with Azure Data Factory, (ADF) didn’t worry too much as they built out pipelines, as they could always pause the service at the resource level.

In recent weeks this feature has been deprecated and customers may be at a loss as to how to proceed. The best part about technology is that there’s always another way to accomplish something, you just need to figure out how to do it. Lucky for us, the Azure team wouldn’t have removed an option without another way to perform the task and in fact, introduced an enhanced way to do this.

The switch is to move in and pause at the pipeline layer vs. the resource layer. I promise- This can be done with one step and one script. Luckily, I’d already moved my current customers to this solution over the last number of months since it was the solution that had made the most sense at the time. It was a secondary benefit that when the resource level PAUSE option was removed from the resource level in the portal, no impact was experienced by my customers. I just want to make sure that those who weren’t lucky enough to plan this way have the answer.

If you were dependent upon the resource tier PAUSE option and would like the script to schedule your jobs, setting the activity on the ADF resource, please check out this SSIS blog post from Microsoft with the script included.

Happy Azure-ing 🙂