Introduction to cluster storage

Important

This feature is currently in preview. The Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews include more legal terms that apply to Azure features that are in beta, in preview, or otherwise not yet released into general availability. For information about this specific preview, see Azure HDInsight on AKS preview information. For questions or feature suggestions, please submit a request on AskHDInsight with the details and follow us for more updates on Azure HDInsight Community.

Azure HDInsight on AKS can seamlessly integrate with Azure Storage, which is a general-purpose storage solution that works well with many other Azure services. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen 2) is the default file system for the clusters.

The storage account could be used as the default location for data, cluster logs, and other output that are generated during cluster operation. It could also be a default storage for the Hive catalog that depends on the cluster type.

For more information, see Introduction to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

Managed identities for secure file access

Azure HDInsight on AKS uses managed identities (MSI) to secure cluster access to files in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Managed identity is a feature of Microsoft Entra ID that provides Azure services with a set of automatically managed credentials. These credentials can be used to authenticate to any service that supports Active Directory authentication. Moreover, managed identities don't require you to store credentials in code or configuration files.

In Azure HDInsight on AKS, once you select a managed identity and storage during cluster creation, the managed identity can seamlessly work with storage for data management, provided the Storage Blob Data Owner role is assigned to the user-assigned MSI.

The following table outlines the supported storage options for Azure HDInsight on AKS (public preview):

Cluster Type	Supported Storage	Connection	Role on Storage
Trino, Apache Flink, and Apache Spark	ADLS Gen2	Cluster user-assigned managed identity (MSI)	The user-assigned MSI needs to have Storage Blob Data Owner role on the storage account.

Note

To share a storage account across multiple clusters, you can just assign the corresponding cluster user-assigned MSI “Storage Blob Data Owner” on the shared storage account. Learn how to assign a role.

After that, you can use the full storage abfs:// path to access the data via your applications.

For more information, see Managed identities for Azure resources.
Learn how to create an ADLS Gen2 account.

Azure HDInsight on AKS storage architecture

The following diagram provides an abstract view of the Azure HDInsight on AKS architecture of Azure Storage.

Storage management

Currently, Azure HDInsight on AKS doesn't support storage accounts with soft delete enabled, make sure you disable soft delete for your storage account.