Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a powerful solution that helps address your significant data analytics needs. As an Azure cloud architect, I helped create Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts for many clients. In this article, I will guide you through some straightforward approaches to accomplishing this task.
Table of Contents
How To Create Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
Before we begin, let me outline the prerequisites required here.
Prerequisites
You must have an Azure subscription. If you haven’t already done so, you can create a free Azure account now.
Assuming you are ready with the prerequisites, let us start with each approach individually.
Approach-1: Using Azure Portal
To create Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, follow the steps below.
1. Log in to the Azure Portal.
2. Search for the Storage accounts and click on the search result Storage accounts as below.

3. Click on the +Create button as shown below.

4. In the Create a Storage Account window, on the Basics tab, fill in the details below.
- Subscription: Select the appropriate subscription.
- Resource Group: You can select an existing resource group or click on the Create new link to create a new one.
- Storage account name: Enter a unique name for the storage account.
- Region: Select your preferred location.
- Primary service: Choose Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2.
- Performance: Choose Standard or Premium based on your requirements.
- Redundancy: Select GRS, LRS, etc, based on your requirement.
Now, click on the Next button to navigate to the advanced tab. For better clarity, refer to the screenshot below.

On the Advanced tab, ensure that you select the Enable hierarchical namespace option, as highlighted in the screenshot below.

Keep all other default options as they are, and now click on the Review + Create button.
Finally, click the Create button on the next window, as shown in the screenshot below.

The Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account has been created successfully, as shown in the screenshot below. Click the Go to Resource button to navigate to the account we created above.

Check out Azure Storage Account Key
Approach-2: Using PowerShell
We can execute the following PowerShell command to create an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.
$resourceGroupName = 'MyNewResGrp'
$storageAccountName = 'usasa'
$location = 'East US'
New-AzStorageAccount `
-ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
-Name $storageAccountName `
-Location $location `
-SkuName "Standard_LRS" `
-Kind "StorageV2" `
-EnableHierarchicalNamespace $trueAfter executing the PowerShell script above, I got the expected output, as shown below. The account has been created successfully.

To cross-check, I logged in to the Azure Portal and saw that the account had been created successfully, as shown in the screenshot below.

Check out how to enable Azure Storage Account Public Access
Approach-3 Using Azure CLI
Using the script below, we can also use the Azure CLI script to achieve this.
az storage account create --name newworksa --resource-group MyNewResGrp --location Eastus --sku Standard_LRS --kind StorageV2 --enable-hierarchical-namespace trueAfter executing the above script, I got the expected output, shown in the screenshot below.

To cross-check again, I logged in to the Azure Portal and saw that the account had been created successfully. Please refer to the screenshot below for your reference.

Video Tutorial
Conclusion
Creating Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is crucial when dealing with big data analytics needs. You can use Azure Portal, PowerShell, and Azure CLI to achieve this. Based on your requirements, you can select the most suitable approach.
You may also like the following articles.
- How to create a private endpoint for a storage account in Azure
- How to restore a deleted storage account in Azure
- Move the storage account to another region

I am Rajkishore, and I am a Microsoft Certified IT Consultant. I have over 14 years of experience in Microsoft Azure and AWS, with good experience in Azure Functions, Storage, Virtual Machines, Logic Apps, PowerShell Commands, CLI Commands, Machine Learning, AI, Azure Cognitive Services, DevOps, etc. Not only that, I do have good real-time experience in designing and developing cloud-native data integrations on Azure or AWS, etc. I hope you will learn from these practical Azure tutorials. Read more.
