Azure Data Lake Storage
Azure Data Lake Storage is a scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud storage service from Microsoft Azure designed for big data analytics workloads. It provides a hierarchical namespace that organizes files into directories and subdirectories, enabling high-performance analytics on massive amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It integrates seamlessly with Azure analytics services like Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure HDInsight.
Developers should use Azure Data Lake Storage when building data lakes for large-scale analytics, machine learning, or real-time processing scenarios, as it offers petabyte-scale storage with high throughput and low latency. It is ideal for enterprises handling diverse data types (e.g., logs, IoT data, multimedia) that require centralized storage with security features like encryption and role-based access control. Use cases include data warehousing, AI/ML model training, and streaming analytics in cloud-native environments.