Apache Atlas is an open-source metadata management and governance project, originally built around Hadoop. It provides core services for a shared metadata store, lineage enriched with business taxonomy, classification, and technical and operational auditing. Through hooks it collects metadata from sources such as Hive, HBase, Kafka and Sqoop. Access control is handled through Apache Ranger, with role-based and attribute-based authorisation. Atlas suits organisations that run their own data lake or Hadoop/Spark environment and is installed and operated by the user; the project does not offer a SaaS service.
Atlas is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and developed under the Apache Software Foundation, a US non-profit (501(c)(3)) run by volunteers. Because no central vendor hosts the software, the user decides where data resides, for example in a European data centre or on-premises. The source code is public and can be inspected. The organisation does, however, need the skills and capacity to install, maintain and secure it.