Cloudera Docs

Introduction to RAZ on AWS environments

Cloudera Public Cloud defaults to using cloud storage which might be challenging while managing data access across teams and individual users. The Ranger Authorization Service (RAZ) resolves this challenge by enabling Amazon S3 users to use fine-grained access policies and audit capabilities available in Apache Ranger similar to those used with HDFS files in an on-premises or IaaS deployment.

The core RAZ for AWS for Data Lakes and several Cloudera Data Hub templates are available for production use platform-wide.

Many of the use cases that RAZ for S3 enables are cases where access control on files or directories is needed. Some examples include:
  • Per-user home directories.
  • Cloudera Data Engineering (Spark) efforts that require access to cloud storage objects and directories.
  • Cloudera Data Warehouse queries (Hive/Impala) that use external tables.
  • Access to Ranger's rich access control policies such as date-based access revocation, user/group/role-based controls, along with corresponding audit.
  • Tag-based access control using the classification propagation feature that originates from directories.
Prior to the introduction of RAZ, controlling access to S3 could be enforced at coarse-grained group level using IDBroker mappings. This required rearchitecting the implementation of important file-centric activities as well as admin-level access to both the AWS account and the Cloudera account.

In HDP and CDH deployments, files and directories are protected with a combination of HDFS Access Control Lists (ACLs) (in CDH, HDP) and Ranger HDFS policies (in HDP). Similarly, in an AWS Cloudera Public Cloud environment with RAZ for S3 enabled, Ranger's rich access control policies can be applied to Cloudera's access to S3 buckets, directories, and files and can be controlled with admin-level access to Cloudera alone.

You can backup and restore the metadata maintained in the Data Lake services of RAZ-enabled environments. For more information, see Data Lake Backup and Restore.

Limitations to use RAZ in AWS environments

The following limitations and known issues have been identified and are under development:
  • Currently, there is no automated way to enable RAZ in an existing Cloudera environment that does not have RAZ enabled.

Architecture diagram

The following architecture diagram shows how RAZ integrates and interacts with other components in a RAZ-enabled AWS environment:
The image shows an architecture diagram which illustrates how RAZ is integrates and interacts with other components in a RAZ-enabled AWS environment.