With the development of Synapse, Power BI and the rise of the lakehouse architecture, is there a viable solution to build departmental cubes avoiding Analysis Services? I'm trying to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is now.
Can the new features in Power BI Datasets https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-as-a-superset-of-azure-analysis-services/ replace some of the functionality of Analysis Services, and then cubes will be hosted in the Power BI service as Power BI Datasets?
As the article mentioned, PBI is a superset of AAS.
PBI Datasets are essentially the same thing as AAS tabular models, they can both be edited by Tabular Editor. PBI is constantly improving functionality so I would expect it to eventually have all the functionality that AAS has.
So basically... Yes, you can replace AAS with PBI Datasets with some caveats depending on what's available now. In my opinion, AAS still has some benefits that PBI still does not have (ie. pausing and scaling instances).