Melissa Coates has started a multi-part series on Azure Data Lake permissions. She’s put up the first three parts already. Part 1 covers the types of permissions available as well as some official documentation:
(1) RBAC permissions to the ADLS account itself, for the purpose of managing the resource.
RBAC = Role-based access control. RBAC are the familiar Azure roles such as reader, contributor, or owner. Granting a role on the service allows someone to view or manage the configuration and settings for that particular Azure service (ADLS in this case). See Part 2 for info about setting up RBAC.
Part 2 looks at permissions for the Azure Data Lake Store service itself:
Setting permissions for the service + the data stored in ADLS is always two separate processes, with one exception: when you define an owner for the ADLS service in Azure, that owner is automatically granted ‘superuser’ (full) access to manage the ADLS resource in Azure *AND* full access to the data. Any other RBAC role other than owner needs the data access specifically assigned via ACLs. This is a good thing because not all system administrators need to see the data, and not all data access users/groups/service principals need access to the service itself. This type of separation is true for certain other services too, such as Azure SQL Database.
Try to use groups whenever you can to grant access, rather than individual accounts. This is a consistent best practice for managing security across many types of systems.
Part 3 covers using ACLs to grant rights to specific files or folders in Azure Data Lake Storage:
There are two types of ACLs: Access ACLs and Default ACLs.
An Access ACL is the read/write/execute permissions specified for a folder or file. Every single folder or file has its security explicitly defined — so that means the ADLS security model is not an ‘inheritance’ model. That is an important concept to remember.
A Default ACL is like a ‘template’ setting at a folder level (the concept of a default doesn’t apply at the file level). Any new child item placed in that folder will automatically obtain that default security setting. The default ACLs are absolutely critical, given that data permissions aren’t an inheritance model. You want to avoid a situation where a user has permission to read a folder, but is unable to see any of the files within the folder — that situation will happen if a new file gets added to a folder which has an access ACL set at the folder level, but not a default ACL to apply to new child objects.
There’s a lot of good information here and I’m looking forward to parts 4 and 5.