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Azure Databricks And Active Directory

Tristan Robinson wraps up a two-parter on Azure Databricks security:

With the addition of Databricks runtime 5.1 which was released December 2018, comes the ability to use Azure AD credential pass-through. This is a huge step forward since there is no longer a need to control user permissions through Databricks Groups / Bash and then assigning these groups access to secrets to access Data Lake at runtime. As mentioned previously – with the lack of support for AAD within Databricks currently, ACL activities were done on an individual basis which was not ideal. By using this feature, you can now pass the authentication onto Data Lake, and as we know one of the advantages of Data Lake is the tight integration into Active Directory so this simplifies things. Its worth noting that this feature is currently in public preview but having tested it thoroughly, am happy with the implementation/limitations. The feature also requires a premium workspace and only works with high concurrency clusters – both of which you’d expect to use in this scenario.

It looks like this is the way to go forward with securing Azure Databricks. Read the whole thing.