These security policies are enforced within Hadoop ecosystem using lightweight Ranger Java plugins, which run as part of the same process as the Namenode (HDFS), Hive2Server(Hive), HBase server (Hbase), Nimbus server (Storm) and Knox server (Knox). Authorized users will be able to manage their security policies using the web tool or using REST APIs. At the core, Ranger is a centralized web application, which consists of the policy administration, audit and reporting modules. Currently, it’s capable of providing authorization as well as auditing for HDFS, Hive, HBase, Knox and Storm services.

Ranger provides a centralized way to manage security across various components in a Hadoop cluster. We recently implemented this in one of our customer sites and talk about that experience here. Apache Hadoop community is trying to emulate some of those concepts in the recently incubated Apache Ranger project. It involves creation of roles, grants at various levels on variety of objects. Manoj may be authorized to create and delete databases, while Terence is only authorized to read the tables.įor folks who are coming from a traditional database world, authorization is a well understood concept. Authorization refers to rules that determine who is allowed to do what.This post will not cover any details about this as there’s ample material already available online. In Hadoop, this is achieved via Kerberization. Authentication is the process of ascertaining that somebody really is who he claims to be.Over the past couple of years, Apache Hadoop has made great progress in the area of security. Security for any computing system is divided in two categories:

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