Connecting ADF to Cloud Data Sources

ADF can be used to connect to various cloud data sources, including Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage. In this lesson, we’ll provide step-by-step instructions for connecting ADF to these two popular cloud data sources.

Note: To connect Azure Data Factory to a cloud service provider, an active subscription to the cloud provider (in this lesson AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage) is required. We'll walk you through the steps to take for connecting AWS and GCP data stores with ADF and the purpose of this lesson is to give theoritcal background about establishing this connection.

Azure Data Factory connections to cloud storage solutions

ADF enables easy connections to a variety of cloud and on-premises data sources and destinations. There are many cloud storage solutions that ADF can connect to, including Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and more.

These storage solutions are highly scalable and provide cost-effective storage options for storing and processing large volumes of data. Similar to on-premises data sources, connection to cloud data sources is also established using a linked serviceA linked service is a configuration that defines the connection information for a specific data store or computing resource. in Azure Data Factory. A linked service can be created from the ADF web UI or through an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. On successful creation of the linked service, the data source can be linked to activities inside ADF that enable data operations through an ADF pipeline. In ADF, a pipeline is a set of activities that define the movement and transformation of data. Activities can be source or sink, and they can perform various transformations on the data.