Azure Data lake VS Azure HDInsight
I was going through the Microsoft documents:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-lake-store/data-lake-store-overview
I'm new to Azure Data lake and HDInsight. There is a statement in the URL which tells that
"Azure Data Lake Store can be accessed from Hadoop (available with HDInsight cluster) using the WebHDFS-compatible REST APIs."
As per my initial understanding, Data lake store is a store in which any kind of data can be stored. I think, HDInsight also kind of does the same thing.
My question is what is the difference between Azure Data lake and Azure HDInsight? If HDInsight can be used for file storage or any kind of storage then Why to use Data Lake?It would be great if some one could clarify this in details. Thanks.
Answer
The easiest way to think of Data Lake is to think of this large container that has like a real lake with rivers coming into the river you never know where the rivers are coming from (or what "type" of river). Azure Data Lake was introduced to make big data easy for developers, data scientists, and analysts to store data of any size. It removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all your data while making it faster to get up and running with big data. Data Lake is able to stored the mass different types of data (Structured data, unstructured data, log files, real-time, images, etc. ) and to blend that together, to correlate many different data types. The key thing here is as we are moving from traditional way to the modern tools (like Hadoop, Cassandra, NoSQL DB, etc). Azure Data Lake includes three services:
- Azure Data Lake Store, a no limits data lake that powers big data analytics
- Azure Data Lake Analytics, a massively parallel on-demand job service
- Azure HDInsight, a full managed Cloud Hadoop and Spark offering
Azure Data Lake Store is like a cloud-based file service or file system that is pretty much unlimited in size. We can run services on top of the data that's in that store. So you could use Hadoop or Spark in an HDInsight cluster, or you could use the Azure Data Lake analytic service, which is a complement to the Azure Data Lake Store. And what that service will let you do is to run jobs that effectively query the data you have stored in the Azure Data Lake store and generate output results.