Azure Data Factory Overview 2023

Azure Data Factory is a cloud extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that helps automate data integration and transformation from on-premises data sources, third-party database services, and Azure-hosted services, such as Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, Synapse Analytics, Azure HDInsight, Azure Data Lake Storage, Databricks, and Cosmos DB.

Data Factory offers quick deployment, scalability, and global reach and provides a locally deployed gateway component to support hybrid configurations. Organizations can use Data Factory to create pipelines in various ETL/ELT formats that combine data from multiple sources. For example, a pipeline might pull (extract) data from regional sales databases, summarize (transform) the data, and save (load) the results into a corporate data warehouse that is used to calculate daily sales performance metrics.

Data Factory provides three deployment options, called modes, that vary significantly.

Native mode is a low-code solution and the primary focus of Microsoft’s investment. It helps developers create integration processes with minimal coding. It will appeal to organizations looking for a data integration solution that reduces the need to code, with less complex integration requirements, and in situations when they are using other Azure data management services that provide data or are the recipients of data.