Power BI Capacity License (in serrvce vs embedded)

[Anonymous]

I have a question regarding embedded Power BI, premium capacity and Power BI licensing.   First the background.   

We have about 2 developers and 5 testers/business users in Power BI service for our project.  The project will deploy ISV type of embedded Power BI and intend to use service principal in Power BI embedded.   Additionally,

1. We are using imported dataset less than 100MB PBIX
2. We do not intend to do incremental refresh

iii.               We have over 600 clients, meaning we intend to be able to generate a lot of embed tokens

I am aware that we may either acquire Pro licenses for developers and users in other to share contents or deploy reports in premium capacity backed App Workspaces for non-developers to share contents.  

Here are my questions:

Since we are using embedded capacity/Power BI embedded:

1. Do we still require premium capacity in Power BI service, considering that we have moderate need for content sharing (note that we have less than 8 users in service who require collaboration) ?  
2. If answer to 1 is yes, is it suggested for our project to acquire premium capacity inside of Azure or service?

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous Pro licenses are required for your internal folks. The Embedded licensing you can purchase via Azure is the easiest and most straight forward to apply, and allows you to scale up easily if you need to. I think the confusion here, if I read this correctly, is that you are getting stuck on the "Premium/Capacity" verbiage that is also used with embedded. You do not need a P1 premium sku unless you plan on sharing from the Service to your clients (which you arent'). With an embedded license (Say A3), you still provision workspaces to a capacity so that the SPN you assign to the workspace will authenticate and allow the end users to consume the report in your application without the need for a license because they are covered via the A3 license. The A3 license and effects in the Service allow you to see the "premium" capacity metrics and other aspects typically associated to a P1 sku.

Assigning the A sku's are done in Azure, there is no license assignment in Power BI itself.

[Anonymous]

Thank you @Seth_C_Bauer  for the detailed reponse.  May I ask what you mean by SPN?

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Anonymous Service Principal Name / technically the Service Principal account.