Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) is a massively scalable distributed file system that can be accessed through an HDFS-compatible API. ADLS acts as a persistent storage layer for CDH clusters running on Azure. In contrast to Amazon S3, ADLS more closely resembles native HDFS behavior, providing consistency, file directory structure, and POSIX-compliant ACLs. See the ADLS documentation for conceptual details.

CDH 5.11 and higher supports using ADLS as a storage layer for MapReduce2 (MRv2 or YARN), Hive, Hive-on-Spark, Spark 2.1, and Spark 1.6. Comparable HBase support was added in CDH 5.12.

For information about using Hive with ADLS, see Configuring ADLS Connectivity for CDH.