Overview of Azure Data Platform Services
Microsoft Azure provides an array of services to store, process, and manage data solutions. Provisioning and configuring these are easy and don’t have a steep learning curve. We can manage or provide these services by using Azure CLI, Azure Portal, or Azure PowerShell.
The following services are part of Microsoft Azure’s Data Platform which helps us build and manage data solutions:
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a managed, secure, and scalable relational database as a service (DBaaS) offering of Microsoft Azure which falls in the category of Platform as a Service (PaaS). It has built.in backup, recovery, and patch-ups. With Azure SQL Database, we can focus on working on the business requirement without worrying about the underlying hardware OS or even managing the database engine.
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a highly scalable, multi-model, and globally distributed database service offered by Microsoft Azure. It is a fully managed NoSQL database service and supports multiple database APIs like the SQL API, API for MongoDB, Cassandra API, Table API, and Gremlin API. We can build applications by leveraging the client libraries of Azure Cosmos DB by using the language of our choice.
Azure Database for MySQL
Azure Database for MySQL is a fully managed relational database as a service offered by Microsoft azure. It is based on the database engine of MySQL Community Edition. It is a highly available service while being compliant with industry-leading compliances to protect data while in transit as well as in rest. It comes up with automatic backups and monitoring capabilities. It helps to work on the business requirement and accelerate our time to market without worrying about underlying infrastructure management.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a managed relational database as a service (DBaaS) offered by Microsoft Azure. It is based on the runtime engine of the PostgreSQL community edition. It provides built.in high availability and data protection by automatic backups. It provides scaling up or down as per our requirements in a matter of seconds. It provides enterprise-grade security to our data while at rest or in transit.
Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse analytics is an enterprise-grade analytics service offered by Microsoft Azure which helps us in reducing the time to gather insights from the data stored in various data warehouses and big data systems. It is integrated with various Azure services like Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks, and Azure ML to name a few. It supports multiple languages like Python, R, SQL, Java, and Scala which are normally used for analytics purposes.
Azure Databricks
Azure Databricks is a data analytics platform created by the joint efforts of Microsoft in collaboration with the team which had created Apache Spark. Azure Databricks is built on top of Apache Spark. It supports easy integration with various Azure services like Azure Blob storage, SQL databases to name a few. It supports multiple languages like Scala, Java, Python.
Azure Data Lake
Azure Data Lake is a highly scalable cloud-based data lake offered by Microsoft Azure as its enterprise big data analytics solution for the cloud. It is built on top of Azure Blob Storage. We can store data of any type, size with different ingestion speeds in Azure Data Lake without transforming them. It is a Hadoop-compatible service and is highly cost-effective in nature. It supports an array of Azure services that we can use to perform data ingestion, analytics as well as to build visualizations.
Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Factory is a fully managed, cloud-based service offered by Microsoft Azure to perform large-scale ELT, ETL, and integration tasks. It provides a code-free UI where we can create our data workflow by using various activities to transform and transfer data to desired destinations. It has more than 90 built.in connectors to connect with various sources like Google Big Query and Amazon RedShift to name a few. We can use Azure Data Factory to perform various kinds of tasks which include data integration, transformation, and transfer tasks.
Azure Storage Account
Azure Storage Account is a suite of cloud storage services comprising core storage services. Storage account consists of five core storage services namely Azure Blob, Queue, Files, Disks, and table storage. We can leverage the power of an azure storage account to meet most of our storage needs without worrying about the underlying hardware devices. We can store data of various formats like images, videos, or logs in a storage account.
In all, Microsoft Azure provides end-to-end solutions to monitor and manage Data Platform services. Which one do you use often? Leave us a comment!
Hope this was helpful.
