Apache Ranger is a framework for centralised, fine-grained authorisation and auditing across data and AI platforms. Administrators define policies in Ranger Admin, through a web interface or REST API; plugins inside each protected service, such as Hive, HBase, Kafka and Solr, enforce those policies and log access decisions. Policies can target resources, tags or attributes, and can filter rows and mask columns. Ranger supports role-based and attribute-based access control, among other models. You install and operate it yourself; the project does not offer a SaaS service.
Ranger is open source under the Apache License 2.0 and a project of 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 it runs and where data and audit logs reside, for example on-premises or in a European data centre. The source code is public and can be inspected. In return, the organisation is itself responsible for installing, maintaining, updating and securing the framework.