Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based, fully managed, data-integration ETL service that automates the movement and transformation of data. It facilitates users to create data-driven workflows in the cloud and automates data movement and transformation. Azure Data Factory is also called ADF and facilitates users to create and schedule the data-driven workflows (called pipelines) that can retrieve data from disparate data stores and process and transform the data by using computing services such as HDInsight Hadoop, Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning.
It is called Data Factory because it works like a factory that runs equipment to transform raw materials into finished goods. In the same way, Azure Data Factory uses services to collect raw data and transform it into ready-to-use information.
We can create data-driven workflows to move data between on-premises and cloud data stores using Azure Data Factory. It also facilitates us to process and transform data with Data Flows. We can execute our data processing either on an Azure-based cloud service or in our own self-hosted compute environments, such as SSIS, SQL Server, or Oracle.
