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Presto Doesn’t Work with Apache Ranger (Yet)

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Google Group Discovery

After a fairly long fight at building ranger and getting it ready to install, I came across this google group item randomly which made me sad:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/presto-users/gp5tRn9J7kk

It has the following question:

I have setup Presto, Hive, Hue and also setup Ranger for controlling column level access to LDAP users.
Able to see the restrictions getting applied on Hive queries by LDAP users, but however these restrictions are not getting applied on Presto queries.
I understand Presto also uses the same Hive Metastore and Can someone help me why the restricted column access are obeyed in Hive and not Presto when logged in as LDAP user?
And this response:

I am afraid Presto is not integrated with Apache Ranger today. Instead Presto only obeys table-level permissions defined in Hive Metastore.

It’s definitely a roadmap item, we have heard similar requests for integration with Apache Sentry. No specific target date for either at this point.

The Verdict

So, unfortunately, it looks like even if I do finish installing Ranger, I will not be able to get the column level security I’m looking for in Presto.  So, I’m going to move on to analyzing other non-Ranger options.  I’ll also had somewhat ruled out Sentry even before reading this due to a stack-overflow post I read: https://stackoverflow.com/a/56247090/857994 which states:

Just quick update with Cloudera+Hortonworks merge last year. These companies have decided to standardize on Ranger. CDH5 and CDH6 will still use Sentry until CDH product line retires in ~2-3 years. Ranger will be used for Cloudera+Hortonworks’ combined “Unity” platform.

Cloudera were saying to us that Ranger is a more “mature” product. Since Unity hasn’t released yet (as of May 2019), something may come up in the future, but that’s the current direction. If you’re a former Cloudera customer / or CDH user, you would still have to use Apache Sentry. There is a significant overlap between Sentry and Ranger, but if you start fresh, definitely look at Ranger.

I had also already seen numerous other things online agreeing with this and saying that Sentry is weak and Ranger is far more advanced; so this is not surprising.

Eventual Implementation

I found this page https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/RANGER/Presto+Plugin which tells you how to use a ranger-presto plugin.  It was literally made and last edited on May 19th 2019 and refers to version 1.2 of Ranger (the current release).

As I’m writing this on June 9th and 1.2 was released in September 2018 (based on its release note creation date at this site https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/RANGER/Apache+Ranger+1.2.0+-+Release+Notes), this is clearly not released yet.

I double checked on git hub and sure enough, this was just committed 20 days ago.

plugin-presto RANGER-2395 : Add Presto plugin, This implements a plugin for Presto,… 20 days ago

I wrote one of the committers to get their view on this problem and potential release schedules/etc just for future reference.

Other Options

Apparently Starburst, a Presto vendor company that works on top of various clouds (Azure and AWS), has integrated Sentry and Ranger into their Presto distribution.  You can see that here: https://www.starburstdata.com/technical-blog/presto-security-apache-ranger/.

AWS is also working on Cloud Formation (still in Preview) which supports column level authorization with its Athena (Presto) engine.