Azure Data Lake Storage provides storage for big data solutions. It is especially designed for storing the large amounts of data that are typically needed in big data solutions. It is an Azure-provided managed service and is therefore completely managed by Azure. Customers need only bring their data and store it in a Data Lake.

There are two versions: version 1 (Gen1) and the current version, version 2 (Gen2). Gen2 has all the functionality of Gen1, with the difference that it is built on top of Azure Blob Storage.

As Azure Blob Storage is highly available, can be replicated multiple times, is disaster ready, and is low in cost, these benefits are transferred to Gen2 Data Lake. Data Lake can store any kind of data, including relational, non-relational, filesystem-based, and hierarchical data.

Creating a Data Lake Gen2 instance is as simple as creating a new Storage account. The only change that needs to be done is to enable the hierarchical namespace from the Advanced tab of your Storage account.