Gateway concepts

There are a number of different concepts and designs enterprise BI teams should be familiar with when it comes to the On-premises data gateway. These include the concept of gateway clusters, different gateway architecture designs, and security. Each of these subjects is explored in detail in the following sections.

Gateway clusters

Gateways natively support clustering. Clustering is when independent software systems, called instances or nodes, work together as a unified resource to provide greater scalability and reliability. Each Power BI dataset is associated with a single gateway cluster, which is composed of one or more standard gateway instances.

For example, if a Power BI dataset imports data from both a SQL Server database and an Excel file, the same gateway cluster is responsible for the import from both sources.

Likewise, if hundreds of business users interact with reports based on the same DirectQuery dataset or a Live connection to an...