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Volume Owners

Volume Ownership​

Ownership is a fundamental aspect of Ozone volumes that determines who has administrative control:

  • Each volume has exactly one owner, typically represented by a username
  • Volume owners have full administrative control over their volumes
  • Ownership is established at creation time (ozone sh volume create /vol1 --user=alice)
  • In secure clusters, ownership is tied to authentication mechanisms like Kerberos
  • Volume ownership enables delegation of administrative responsibilities
  • Only the volume owner and Ozone administrators can perform certain operations like:
    • Creating buckets within the volume
    • Setting volume properties
    • Modifying volume quotas
    • Deleting the volume

Ozone Administrators​

In addition to volume owners, Ozone provides system-wide administrative capabilities through special configuration properties:

  • ozone.administrators: Comma-separated list of users with administrative privileges
  • ozone.administrators.groups: Comma-separated list of groups whose members have administrative privileges

Users defined in these configurations have administrative authority over all volumes in the system, regardless of who owns them. This enables centralized management while still allowing delegated ownership of individual volumes.

Example configuration in ozone-site.xml:

<property>
  <name>ozone.administrators</name>
  <value>hdfs,admin,ozone_admin</value>
  <description>Comma-separated list of users with administrator privileges</description>
</property>

<property>
  <name>ozone.administrators.groups</name>
  <value>hadoop,ozone_admins</value>
  <description>Comma-separated list of groups with administrator privileges</description>
</property>

In a secure cluster with Kerberos enabled, these administrators must authenticate with their Kerberos principals before exercising their administrative privileges.

Example Commands​

# Create a volume with specific owner
ozone sh volume create /marketing --user=marketing-team

# Display volume information including ownership
ozone sh volume info /marketing

# List all volumes and their owners
ozone sh volume list /

# Change the owner of an existing volume (requires current owner or admin privileges)
ozone sh volume update --user=new-owner /marketing