Apache Knox Gateway
The Apache Knox Gateway (“Knox”) provides perimeter security so that the enterprise can confidently extend Hadoop access to more of those new users while also maintaining compliance with enterprise security policies.
How Knox Works
A fully secure Hadoop cluster needs Kerberos. Kerberos requires a client side library and complex client side configuration. By encapsulating Kerberos, Knox eliminates the need for client software or client configuration and thus simplifies the access model. In this way, Knox aggregates REST/HTTP calls to various components within the Hadoop ecosystem.
Knox is a stateless reverse proxy framework and can be deployed as a cluster of Knox instances that route requests to Hadoop’s REST APIs. Because Knox is stateless, it scales linearly by adding more Knox nodes as the load increases. A load balancer can route requests to multiple Knox instances.
Knox also intercepts REST/HTTP calls and provides authentication, authorization, audit, URL rewriting, web vulnerability removal and other security services through a series of extensible interceptor pipelines.
What Knox Does
With YARN as its architectural center, Apache Hadoop continues to attract new engines to run within the data platform, as organizations want to efficiently store their data in a single repository and interact with it for batch, interactive and real-time streaming use cases. More and more independent software vendors (ISVs) are developing applications to run in Hadoop via YARN. This increases the number of users and processing engines that operate simultaneously across a Hadoop cluster, on the same data, at the same time.
The Apache Knox Gateway (“Knox”) provides perimeter security so that the enterprise can confidently extend Hadoop access to more of those new users while also maintaining compliance with enterprise security policies. Knox also simplifies Hadoop security for users who access the cluster data and execute jobs. It integrates with prevalent identity management and SSO systems and allows identities from those enterprise systems to be used for seamless, secure access to Hadoop clusters.
Knox provides perimeter security for Hadoop clusters, with these advantages:
| Advantage | Description |
|---|---|
| Single Point of Access |
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| Centralized and Consistent Secure API |
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| Integrated with Existing IdM Systems |
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