Recommended CI/CD Setup for Azure Synapse

Question

Most tutorials and recommendations for how to set up CICD in azure synapse suggest creating multiple workspaces (e.g. -dev, -qa, -uat, -prod) and using a devops pipeline to move artifacts between the environments. Including this video tutorial from the AzureSynapse youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhpboCdNh1I

While this approach works reasonably well, it is in direct conflict with the limit for synapse workspaces in a subscription, which allows at most 2 workspaces per subscription:

I tried opening a support ticket to increase the quota limit, but only got the feedback that this is a hard limit that cannot be increased.

Am I missing something? This hard limit seems rather unreasonable to me, and not in line with the best practises.

Thank you!

Answer 1

@Finn Schmidt
You can explore below options as well to implement CI/CD Setup in azure Synapse
1.Use Multiple Subscriptions

Since the limit applies per subscription, a common workaround is to create separate subscriptions for each environment.

• Example:
  • Subscription A → Dev & QA workspaces
  • Subscription B → UAT & Prod workspaces
  • This approach ensures proper separation between environments while complying with Azure’s hard limits.
• You may need to consolidate billing or permissions across subscriptions using Azure Management Groups.

2. Use Synapse Git Integration Instead of Multiple Workspaces

If managing multiple subscriptions is not feasible, you can use Synapse Git Integration (with Azure DevOps or GitHub) to version-control Synapse artifacts.

• This allows you to develop in a single workspace and deploy changes across different environments using CI/CD pipelines.
• Instead of multiple workspaces, deploy Synapse components dynamically using parameterized deployment templates in Azure DevOps.

I hope this information helps.