The Apache Software Foundation welcomed another project to the top level this week. Apache Ranger, a Big Data security-management framework for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, has graduated from the Apache Incubator.
Apache Ranger is used by companies like ING, Protegrity and Sprint, along with a few other organizations. It offers comprehensive security coverage and native support for other Apache projects, like Atlas (still in incubation), HBase, HDFS, Hive, Kafka, Knox, NiFi, Solr, Storm and YARN.
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“Graduating to a Top-Level Project reflects the maturity and growth of the Ranger Community,” said Selvamohan Neethiraj, vice president of Apache Ranger. “We are pleased to celebrate a great milestone and officially play an integral role in the Apache Big Data ecosystem.”
Some key benefits of Ranger include its ability to access control policies that can be managed by security administrators from a single place, according to the Apache Foundation’s release notes.
With Ranger, the Apache community can add new systems for authorization outside of the Hadoop system. The other advanced features include user context enrichers, dynamic policy conditions, and its Ranger Key Management Service, which is compatible with Hadoop’s Key Management Server API.
Early adopters of Ranger like ING rely on the project as a key part of their security infrastructure for data, according to Ferd Scheepers, chief information architect at ING.
“We laud the community’s efforts in building an extensible and enterprise grade architecture for Apache Ranger, and for innovative features such as tag or classification based security (built in conjunction with Apache Atlas),” he said “We congratulate the Apache Ranger community on achieving this significant milestone and are confident Apache Ranger will evolve into the de facto standard for security stack across the Hadoop ecosystem.”
