Kerberos

Airflow has initial support for Kerberos. This means that Airflow can renew kerberos tickets for itself and store it in the ticket cache. The hooks and dags can make use of ticket to authenticate against kerberized services.

Limitations

Please note that at this time, not all hooks have been adjusted to make use of this functionality. Also it does not integrate kerberos into the web interface and you will have to rely on network level security for now to make sure your service remains secure.

Celery integration has not been tried and tested yet. However, if you generate a key tab for every host and launch a ticket renewer next to every worker it will most likely work.

Enabling kerberos

Airflow

To enable kerberos you will need to generate a (service) key tab.

# in the kadmin.local or kadmin shell, create the airflow principal
kadmin:  addprinc -randkey airflow/fully.qualified.domain.name@YOUR-REALM.COM

# Create the airflow keytab file that will contain the airflow principal
kadmin:  xst -norandkey -k airflow.keytab airflow/fully.qualified.domain.name

Now store this file in a location where the airflow user can read it (chmod 600). And then add the following to your airflow.cfg

[core]
security = kerberos

[kerberos]
keytab = /etc/airflow/airflow.keytab
reinit_frequency = 3600
principal = airflow

Launch the ticket renewer by

# run ticket renewer
airflow kerberos

Hadoop

If want to use impersonation this needs to be enabled in core-site.xml of your hadoop config.

<property>
  <name>hadoop.proxyuser.airflow.groups</name>
  <value>*</value>
</property>

<property>
  <name>hadoop.proxyuser.airflow.users</name>
  <value>*</value>
</property>

<property>
  <name>hadoop.proxyuser.airflow.hosts</name>
  <value>*</value>
</property>

Of course if you need to tighten your security replace the asterisk with something more appropriate.

Using kerberos authentication

The hive hook has been updated to take advantage of kerberos authentication. To allow your DAGs to use it, simply update the connection details with, for example:

{ "use_beeline": true, "principal": "hive/_HOST@EXAMPLE.COM"}

Adjust the principal to your settings. The _HOST part will be replaced by the fully qualified domain name of the server.

You can specify if you would like to use the dag owner as the user for the connection or the user specified in the login section of the connection. For the login user, specify the following as extra:

{ "use_beeline": true, "principal": "hive/_HOST@EXAMPLE.COM", "proxy_user": "login"}

For the DAG owner use:

{ "use_beeline": true, "principal": "hive/_HOST@EXAMPLE.COM", "proxy_user": "owner"}

and in your DAG, when initializing the HiveOperator, specify:

run_as_owner=True

To use kerberos authentication, you must install Airflow with the kerberos extras group:

pip install 'apache-airflow[kerberos]'

You can read about some production aspects of kerberos deployment at Kerberos-authenticated workers

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