Most organizations have built expensive EDWs as the centralized data repositories serving critical business decisions. The relational EDW-based architecture is struggling to handle the data growth and ability to provide near real-time metrics. Hadoop-based Data Lake has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to EDW providing access to real-time information to business users in a more agile fashion.

Microsoft HDInsight Azure-based service is well-positioned to enable a modern Data Lake on the cloud thereby further reducing operational and data center costs.

In the next chapter, we will build, configure, and monitor a new HDInsight cluster, which is the first step in building a Data Lake.