Feature Comparisons
ADLS Gen 2 is where all future development of Azure Big Data storage is taking place, in the cloud server as well as the client connector. In contrast, ADLS Gen 1 must be considered a maintenance only data store, which is not being rolled out across more Azure regions.
| Feature | Azure Storage | ADLS Gen 1 | ADLS Gen 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadly supported in applications | Yes | No | Yes in non-hierarchical; growing in hierarchical |
| Scales to many petabytes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Available in all Azure region | Yes | No | Yes |
| Interoperability | ADLS Gen 2 in non-hierarchical | none | Azure Storage |
| Directories with permissions | No | Yes | Yes |
Differences between ADLS Gen 1 and ADLS Gen 2
ADLS Gen 2 should be considered as a reimplementation of the ADLS Gen 1 features, but integrated with the original Azure Storage.
Features of ADLS Gen 2
- Supports the Hadoop FileSystem API, with directories, file and directory permissions, and other key features.
- Reads and writes data stores in the original Azure Storage (which has previously used the wasb:// URL)
- No integration with ADLS Gen1. The adls:// connector must be used there.
- Available in all Azure regions.
- If an ADLS Gen 2 account is created "without hierarchical namespaces" then the wasb:// connector can read/write data stored in ADLS Gen 2.
- Capable of storing many Petabytes of data.
