**Direct answer:** ADF orchestrates pipelines. Synapse is analytics (serverless + dedicated SQL, plus its own pipelines). Fabric is the SaaS umbrella (OneLake, lakehouse, Direct Lake Power BI). You still learn ADF patterns even if the tenant is moving to Fabric, because the mental model of ingest → transform → serve does not go away.

When to use which

Workload Prefer Copy + schedule + IR to on-prem ADF T-SQL on a data lake Synapse serverless High-concurrency warehouse Dedicated pool or Fabric warehouse Power BI on lakehouse without import Fabric Direct Lake Spark notebooks Databricks or Fabric notebooks

Course

[Azure Data Engineering in Chennai](https://skilbrill.com/courses/azure-data-engineering-in-chennai/) covers ADF, Synapse, Databricks, Delta, and Fabric (16 weeks / 96 hours, DP-203 + DP-600). Sibling: [Microsoft Fabric Training](https://skilbrill.com/courses/microsoft-fabric/).