Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert AZ-305 Practice Question

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is built on Azure Blob Storage and provides a hierarchical namespace, giving full compatibility with the ABFS/HDFS driver that Azure Databricks uses. Because it runs on a general-purpose v2 storage account, you can apply lifecycle management rules that move objects between Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers, minimizing long-term retention costs while still permitting on-demand retrieval and direct querying from Azure Synapse Analytics.

Azure NetApp Files offers very high-performance NFS and SMB shares and can support Hadoop workloads through NFS connectors, but it lacks the native hierarchical namespace and integrated blob‐tier lifecycle management required for low-cost, long-term object storage, and is generally more expensive at petabyte scale. Premium Azure Files is intended for SMB or NFS file shares in lift-and-shift scenarios rather than analytics over massive unstructured datasets. Azure Managed Disks are block storage for virtual machines; scaling them to hundreds of terabytes and integrating with Databricks or Synapse would introduce unnecessary complexity and higher cost. Therefore, an ADLS Gen2 account with lifecycle tiering to Cool or Archive is the most suitable and economical choice.