Overview

It is built on top of Blob Storage.
It allows you to interface with your data using both file system and object storage paradigms.
- It is a multi-modal storage service, allowing you to extract analytics value from all of your data.
Features such as file system semantics, file-level security and scale are combined with low-cost, tiered storage, high availability/disaster recovery capabilities.
Data Lake is a storage to store data as is, in its native form.
Data can be stored without introducing any change regardless of its size, structure, or how fast data is ingested.
Azure Data Lake not only supports data storage but can also be used to apply analytical intelligence on stored data.
Data Lake can store any type of data including massive datasets like high-resolution video, genomic and seismic datasets, IoT data, and data in structured, semi structured and unstructured format from a wide variety of industries.

Key Features

Data Lake Storage allows you to manage and access data just as you would with a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
The new ABFS driver is available within all Apache Hadoop environments, including Azure HDInsight and Azure Databricks to access data stored in Data Lake Storage.

Data Lake Storage is considered a multi-modal storage service as it provides both object store and file system interfaces to the same data at the same time.
This is achieved by providing multiple protocol endpoints that are able to access the same data.
Unlike other analytics solutions, data stored in Data Lake Storage does not need to move or be transformed before you can run a variety of analytics tools.
You can access data via traditional Blob storage APIs and process that data using HDInsight or Azure Databricks at the same time.

Data Lake Storage features low-cost storage capacity and transactions.
As data transitions through its complete lifecycle, billing rates change keeping costs to a minimum via built-in features such as Azure Blob storage lifecycle.

Data Lake Storage continues to work with a wide array of tools and frameworks that exist today for Blob storage.