Azure Storage: Azure Storage VS Azure Data Lake Storage (Gen-1 & Gen-II)

Azure Storage VS Azure Data Lake Storage (Gen-1 & Gen-II)

Azure Storage

· Object Storage

· Virtual folders -no real folders.

· No folder level security

· No folder specific performance optimizations

· Data is stored in Containers as blobs

· Storage cost is based on hot, cold and archive tiers

· Available in all regions globally

· Data replication and redundancy options

Azure Data Lake Storage (Gen-1)

· Hierarchical file system

o Supports nesting of files within folders.

· Folder level security can be implemented

o Fine-grained security visa access control lists

· Performance optimization at the folder level

· Parallel reads and writes

· Scaled out over multiple nodes

· Hadoop and big data optimizations

· Optimized for analytics workloads.

Azure Data Lake Storage (Gen-2)

· Multi-modal storage combining features from both Azure Storage and ADLS (Gen-1)

· Enable the Hierarchical Namespace to use for the file system.

· Data can be accessed using object storage endpoint or file system storage endpoint.

· Object Storage Endpoint – wasb://containername@accountname.blob.core.windows.net/

· File System Endpoint – abfs://filesystemname@accountname.dfs.core.windows.net/

· Optimized for analytics workloads.

Leverage partition scans & partition pruning to improve query performance.