Data Governance with Unity Catalog on Databricks

Chapter 3. Identity Management

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde

One of the perks of being in a customer-facing role is that you get to travel and visit different cities. If you’re like Karthik, you enjoy traveling and staying at nice hotels. Imagine visiting a new city for a business meeting and staying at a hotel with modern amenities. Think of all the steps involved in booking a room at the hotel and up until you check out.

The first step is booking. You choose a hotel, pick a room type, enter the details of your stay, and provide your personal information and payment details. The next step is checking in when you arrive at the hotel, where you show your ID and get an access card. During your stay, you get to access the room assigned to you as well as the shared spaces. Once your stay is over, you check out of the hotel by returning your access card at the reception. Throughout your stay, the hotel keeps records of your activities for security and service purposes. For example, you might choose to enjoy the offerings from the minibar in your room, which often cost extra and are tracked and billed accordingly. All these mundane activities together constitute a perfect real-world example of authentication, authorization, and auditing—the three As of IAM.

A hotel is a system. To access that system, you need to fulfill some criteria. The first step of booking includes defining the attributes of your identity. Once that is established, checking in by ...