I have a HDP cluster.
This cluster is configured to use Active Directory as Authentication and Authorization authority. To be more specific, we use Ranger to limit accesses to HDFS directories, Hive tables and Yarn queues after said user provided correct username/password combinaison.
I have been tasked to Kerberise the Cluster, which is very easy thanks to the "press buttons and skip" like option in Ambari.
We Kerberised a test cluster. While interacting with Hive does not require any modification on our existing scripts on the cluster's machines, it is very, very difficult to find a way for end users to interact with Hive from OUTSIDE the cluster (PowerBI, DbVisualizer, PHP application).
Kerberising seems to bring an unnecessary amount of work.
What concret benefits would I get from Kerberising the cluster (except make the guys above in the hierachy happy because, hey, we Kerberised, yoohoo) ?
Edit:
One benefit:
Ranger with AD/LDAP authentication and authorization is ok for external users, but AFAIK, it will not secure machine-to-machine or command-line interactions.
I'm not sure if it still applies, but on a Cloudera cluster without Kerberos, you could fake a login by setting an environment parameter HADOOP_USER_NAME on the command line:
sh-4.1$ whoami
ali
sh-4.1$ hadoop fs -ls /tmp/hive/zeppelin
ls: Permission denied: user=ali, access=READ_EXECUTE, inode="/tmp/hive/zeppelin":zeppelin:hdfs:drwx------
sh-4.1$ export HADOOP_USER_NAME=hdfs
sh-4.1$ hadoop fs -ls /tmp/hive/zeppelin
Found 4 items
drwx------ - zeppelin hdfs 0 2015-09-26 17:51 /tmp/hive/zeppelin/037f5062-56ba-4efc-b438-6f349cab51e4
For machine-to-machine communications, tools like Storm, Kafka, Solr or Spark are not secured by Ranger, but they are secured by Kerberos, so only dedicated processes can use those services.
Source: https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Support-Questions/Kerberos-AD-LDAP-and-Ranger/td-p/96755
Update: Apparently, Kafka and Solr Integration has been implemented in Ranger since then.