Benefits of Azure blob storage over Azure blob storage with SFTP

Question

What are the benefits of choosing Azure blob storage over Azure blob storage with SFTP?

Answer 1

@Vinay Gopinath Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

As you know, you must enable hierarchical namespace for your account to use SFTP. Therefore, SFTP enabled accounts are essentially ADLS Gen2 Accounts vs Blob Storage.

The difference between ADLS Gen2 vs Blob Storage are as follows-

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2) is a hierarchical file system built on top of Blob storage. ADLS Gen2 is optimized for big data analytics workloads and provides features such as POSIX permissions, directory, and file-level access control, and more. Blob storage, on the other hand, is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Blob storage is a simple object storage solution that is cost-effective and provides features such as lifecycle management, tiering, and more^.

Key Differences

Structure
Blob: Flat namespace object store.
ADLS: Hierarchical namespaces (much like a File System).

Purpose
Blob: General purpose object store for a wide variety of storage scenarios, including big data analytics.
ADLS: Optimized storage for big data analytics workloads.

Performance (Analytics Workload)
Blob: Good storage retrieval performance.
ADLS: Better storage retrieval performance.

Cost
Blob: High cost for Analysis.
ADLS: Low cost for Analysis.

Hierarchical namespaces organize blob data into directories and stores metadata about each directory and the files within it. They keep the data organized, which yields better storage and retrieval performance for an analytical use case and lowers the cost of analysis. This structure allows operations, such as directory renames and deletes, to be performed in a single atomic operation.
Flat namespaces, by contrast, require several operations proportionate to the number of objects in the structure.

Referred Docs- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/data-lake-storage-introduction

https://medium.com/awesome-azure/azure-difference-between-azure-blob-storage-and-azure-data-lake-storage-comparison-az

Does that answer your question? Please do let me know if you have any further questions and I will be glad to assist you. Thank you!

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