Does Azure Data Explorer require Azure storage to work?

Question

Azure Data Explorer (Kusto) could ingest data from other sources like file(.csv) and prepare it for query via Kusto Query Language, does the Data Explorer ingest the data to some Azure storage? Asking because I didn't see any storage configuration when creating a new Data Explorer in Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.AzureKusto) as below screenshot.

EDIT: if ADX hides its internal Azure Storage usage from the user (the user cannot configure the storage type, size, region, etc.), then what's the storage limitation, like is there any size limit for ingestion? And the user will pay more if ingesting more data as it takes more Azure storage?

Answer 1

Another few cents: ADX is a dedicated compute PaaS offering. The more data you intend to keep for query, the more storage you are going to use, hence the more you are going to pay. Additionally, local SSD of the compute nodes serve as the cache layer for ADX, so the more data you have (and configured to keep "warm"), the more nodes you are going to need.

In the screenshot above you see "storage optimized" vs. "compute optimized".

Storage optimized means you want to store a lot of data, but your query load is not very high. These SKUs typically have a lot of SSD/premium storage per compute node.

Compute optimized means your query load is going to be high. These SKUs typically have more CPU cores and less SSD/premium storage per compute node.

Answer 2

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) indeed uses Azure Storage as the backend for storing the data and metadata, but this is done behind the scenes. All you need to do to use ADX is create the ADX resource (exactly the process you're already doing, per the screenshot), and you're ready to go!

Feel free to ask any ADX related questions here on StackOverflow, and we'll be happy to assist.

I also encourage you to look at free courses on ADX on PluralSight.