While looking into the possibilities of moving my customer's BI infrastructure into the cloud, my primary question was how to handle the lack of cloud SSAS. But there's a lot more to keep in mind. Here's a few things that I think should be thought of from an architectural point of view: not only in designing your EDW architecture, but also in designing a way of work. I've summarized them below:
Some time ago I read Chris Webb blogged "Thoughts On The Power BI Announcements At The MS Data Insights Summit", where between the lines was this rather interesting point:
For the last few years my customers have asked me when MS was going to release SSAS in the cloud and I’ve always replied that Power BI is SSAS in the cloud – it’s just tightly coupled with a front-end right now.
As I'm currently planning to migrate the entire BI architecture of one of my customers to the cloud, this made me think: can we ditch SSAS as we know it already in favor of Power BI? What are the alternatives?