We are excited to announce the general availability of multi-protocol access for Azure Data Lake Storage. Azure Data Lake Storage is a unique cloud storage solution for analytics that offers multi-protocol access to the same data. This is a no-compromise solution that allows both the Azure Blob Storage API and Azure Data Lake Storage API to access data on a single storage account. You can store all your different types of data in one place, which gives you the flexibility to make the best use of your data as your use case evolves. The general availability of multi-protocol access creates the foundation to enable object storage capabilities on Data Lake Storage. This brings together the best of both object storage and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to enable scenarios that were not possible until today without data copy.

Broader ecosystem of applications and features

Multi-protocol access provides a powerful foundation to enable integrations and features for Data Lake Storage. Existing object storage applications and connectors can now be used to access data stored in Data Lake Storage with no changes. This vastly accelerated the integration of Azure services and the partner ecosystem with Data Lake Storage. We are also announcing the general availability of multiple Azure service integrations with Data Lake Storage including: Azure Stream Analytics, IoT Hub, Azure Event Hubs Capture, Azure Data Box, and Logic Apps. These Azure services now integrate seamlessly with Data Lake Storage. Real-time scenarios are now enabled by easily ingesting streaming data into Data Lake Storage via IoT Hub, Stream Analytics and Event Hubs Capture.

Ecosystem partners have also strongly leveraged multi-protocol access for their applications. Here is what our partners are saying:

“Multi-protocol access is a massive paradigm shift that enables cloud analytics to run on a single account for both blob data and analytics data. We believe that multi-protocol access helps customers rapidly achieve integration with Azure Data Lake Storage using our existing blob connector. This brings tremendous value to customers without needing to do costly re-development efforts.” – Rob Cornell, Head of Cloud Alliances, Talend

Our customers are excited about how their existing blob applications and workloads “just work” leveraging the multi-protocol capability. There are no changes required for their existing blob applications saving them precious development and validation resources. We have customers today running multiple workloads seamlessly against the same data using both the blob connector and the Azure Data Lake Storage connector.

We are also making the ability to tier data between hot and cool tiers for Data Lake Storage generally available. This is great for analytics customers who want to keep frequently used analytics data in the hot tier and move less used data to cooler storage tiers for cost efficiencies. As we continue our journey, we will be enabling more capabilities on Data Lake Storage in upcoming releases. Stay tuned for more announcements in the future!

Get started with multi-protocol access

Visit our multi-protocol access documentation to get started. For additional information see our preview announcement. To learn more about pricing, see our pricing page.