The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache®

Forest Hill, MD, Feb. 08, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Ranger™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

The latest addition to the ASF’s more than three dozen projects in Big Data, Apache Ranger is a centralized framework used to define, administer and manage security policies consistently across Apache Hadoop components. Ranger also offers the most comprehensive security coverage, with native support for numerous Apache projects, including Atlas (incubating), HBase, HDFS, Hive, Kafka, Knox, NiFi, Solr, Storm, and YARN. 

"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."

Apache Ranger provides a simple and effective way to set access control policies and audit the data access across the entire Hadoop stack by following industry best practices. One of the key benefits of Ranger is that access control policies can be managed by security administrators from a single place and consistently across hadoop ecosystem. Ranger also enables the community to add new systems for authorization even outside Hadoop ecosystem, with a robust plugin architecture, that can be extended with minimal effort. In addition, Apache Ranger provides many advanced features, such as:

• Ranger Key Management Service (compatible with Hadoop’s native KMS API to store and manage encryption keys for HDFS Transparent Data Encryption);
• Dynamic column masking and row filtering;
• Dynamic policy conditions (such as prohibition of toxic joins);
• User context enrichers (such as geo-location and time of day mappings); and
• Classification or tag based policies for Hadoop ecosystem components via integration with Apache Atlas.

"As early adopters of Apache Ranger and having contributed to Apache Ranger, we have come to rely upon Apache Ranger as a key part of our security infrastructure for data," said Ferd Scheepers, Chief Information Architect at ING. "We are therefore pleased to learn that the project has now graduated to a TLP project through the efforts of the Apache community. We believe that Apache Ranger represents the best-in-class Open Source security framework for authorization, encryption management, and auditing across Hadoop ecosystem. 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). 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."

"As heavy users of Apache Ranger in production, we are pleased to see the project become a TLP through validation across community efforts," said Timothy R. Connor, Big Data & Advanced Analytics Manager at Sprint. "Apache Ranger has built a next generation ABAC model for authorization along with a robust data-centric Open Source security framework supporting advanced security capabilities such as dynamic row filtering and column masking. All of these point to Apache Ranger maturing into a robust and comprehensive security product for authorization, encryption management and auditing through the Apache community."

"It's great to see Apache Ranger become a TLP," said Dominic Sartorio, Senior Vice President of Products & Development at Protegrity. "Apache Ranger's comprehensive auditing and broad authorization coverage across the Hadoop ecosystem, along with its highly scalable and extensible architecture and rich set of APIs, integrates very well with Protegrity's fine grained data protection capabilities. Our continued collaboration with the Apache Ranger community will help meet the data security requirements of the next generation of enterprise-grade production Hadoop deployments."

"As organizations entrust their enterprise data to Open Source data platforms such as Apache Hadoop, there is a critical need to use the most innovative techniques to safeguard this data," said Alan Gates, Co-Founder of HortonWorks and Apache Ranger incubation mentor. "Apache Ranger community has taken the original, proprietary code base and used it to build a new and successful Apache project that employs an attribute-based approach to define and enforce authorization policies. This modern approach is a combination of subject, action, resource, and environment and goes beyond role-based access control techniques exclusively based on organizational roles - permissions mapping. It has been a pleasure to be their mentor in this process and help them learn the Apache way."

"More and more users are adopting Apache Ranger to secure data in the Hadoop ecosystem," added Neethiraj. "We look forward to welcoming new Ranger users to our mailing lists and community events."

Availability and Oversight Apache Ranger software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For project updates, downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Ranger, visit https://ranger.apache.org/ and @ApacheRanger .

About the Apache Incubator The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 620 individual Members and 5,900 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, OPDi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Ranger", "Apache Ranger", "HBase", "Apache HBase", "HDFS", "Apache HDFS", "Hive", "Apache Hive", "Kafka", "Apache Kafka", "Knox", "Apache Knox", "NiFi", "Apache NiFi", "Solr", "Apache Solr", "Storm", "Apache Storm", "YARN", "Apache YARN", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Sally Khudairi Vice President The Apache Software Foundation +1 617 921 8656