Technical requirements

If you do not already have an Azure account, head over to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/search/ and sign up. Microsoft provides 12 months of popular free services and $200 credit, which is enough to cover the cost of our Azure Data Explorer journey with this book. Microsoft also provides a free to use cluster (https://help.kusto.windows.net/) that is already populated with data. We will use this free cluster and create our own clusters throughout this book.

Please remember to clone or download the Git repository that accompanies the book from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Scalable-Data-Analytics-with-Azure-Data-Explorer. All the code and query samples listed in the book are available in our repository. Download the latest version of Git from https://git-scm.com if you have not already installed the command-line tools.

Important Note

When developing and cloning repositories, I create a development folder in my home directory. On Windows, this is C:\Users\jason\development. On macOS, this is /Users/jason/development. When referencing specific code examples, I will refer to the repository's parent directory as ${HOME}, for example, ${HOME}/Scalable-Data-Analytics-with-Azure-Data-Explorer/Chapterxx/file.kql.