Azure Data Lake Store: A Hyperscale Distributed File Service for Big Data Analytics

Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) is a fully-managed, elastic, scalable, and secure file system that supports Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) and Cosmos semantics. It is specifically designed and optimized for a broad spectrum of Big Data analytics that depend on a very high degree of parallel reads and writes, as well as collocation of compute and data for high bandwidth and low-latency access. It brings together key components and features of Microsoft's Cosmos file system-long used internally at Microsoft as the warehouse for data and analytics-and HDFS, and is a unified file storage solution for analytics on Azure. Internal and external workloads run on this unified platform. Distinguishing aspects of ADLS include its support for multiple storage tiers, exabyte scale, and comprehensive security and data sharing. We discuss ADLS architecture, design points, and performance.