What's new in Atlas for Navigator Users?

Reviewing the differences between Navigator and Apache Atlas helps you to know more about the features and functionalities available for metadata management in Apache Atlas.

Customers migrating from CDH with Navigator will be able to take advantage of these Atlas features:

  • Control data access in Ranger using Atlas metadata. Atlas classifications can control table, row, or column level access; Ranger can use Atlas classifications as the trigger to instruct services to mask data. See Configure Atlas Authorization using Ranger.
  • Reliability and scalability. Atlas uses Kafka to pass metadata and HBase and Solr to store it. These services leverage the distributed nature of the cluster to provide scalability and can be further annealed to be highly-available. See Apache Atlas architecture
  • Additional metadata sources. Atlas is flexible when it comes to adding metadata models for additional sources through REST APIs for metadata capture; it supports NiFi and Kafka metadata in addition to the sources integrated with Navigator. See Extending Atlas to manage metadata from additional sources.
  • Business Glossary. Atlas provides an interface to create and manage a glossary of business terms that can clarify and standardize how data is identified and used in an organization. See Atlas Glossaries overview
  • Data profiling. Data Catalog includes automatic data tagging for a list of common types of data and allows you to tag additional types that can be identified using regular expressions.

When running Atlas in CDP's public cloud offering, you'll also get the benefit of being able to see metadata across all the workloads in a single environment.