Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 vs Blob Storage

What are the differences between Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Blob Storage?

Azure blob storage and ADLS Gen2 are used for storing unstructured data. You can store videos, photos, audio files, excel files, and any data files (parquet, Avro, etc.).

There is a difference between Gen1 and blob storage. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-lake-store/data-lake-store-comparison-with-blob-storage you can find in the MS official document. Mainly differences are Azure Data Lake Gen1 has features like

• Hierarchical file system
• WebHDFS API service
• High throughput and IOPS
• No limits on account size

From the features above, can feel Gen1 is for the big data while blob storage is mainly for storing the blobs.

Gen2, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a set of capabilities dedicated to big data analytics, built on Azure Blob Storage. So Gen2 converges the capabilities of Gen1 WITH Azure Blob Storage. As it is built on top of the blob storage, it will include all benefits from the blob storage as well. (Low-cost, tiered storage, high availability)

Now I think it doesn’t make sense we have blob storage and Gen2 separately if Gen2 is the same price as blob storage but enhanced functionality.

Indeed, I found a little price gap between Gen2 and blob storage.