HDInsight Compared to Azure Data Lake

Two Microsoft hosted services, Azure Data Lake and Azure HDInsight, are both based on Apache’s Hadoop software framework, a popular solution for Big Data storage and analysis. They provide many of the same features and both separate storage and computing resources to allow customers to maintain a data repository at a steady rate and deploy computing resources as needed to meet query demand. While they deliver many of the same capabilities, the services are designed for different workloads.

HDInsight is a multipurpose Hadoop service that provides multiple deployment configurations optimized for a range of workloads, such as general data mining, processing semi-structured data, or high-speed analysis of streaming data. It uses lower-cost storage and allows customers to select virtual machine sizes to balance performance requirements and cost restrictions. However, the service accepts data only from a limited set of products, and queries must go through the HDInsight management layer, which requires deployment of an HDInsight cluster.