Apache Polaris Catalog

"Apache Polaris Catalog: Operating an Open Iceberg Catalog at Scale"
Apache Polaris is fast becoming the control plane for open lakehouse metadata, and operating it well is the difference between a resilient platform and a constant stream of table-commit incidents. This book is written for experienced data platform engineers, SREs, and architects who already run Iceberg in production—or are about to—and need a rigorous, operationally grounded guide to running an open REST catalog under real multi-engine, multi-tenant pressure.
You’ll build a precise mental model of Iceberg’s metadata commit mechanics and what a catalog does (and does not) guarantee, then apply it directly to Polaris: its resource hierarchy, location semantics, and tenancy boundaries. The book goes deep on the Iceberg REST Catalog protocol—bootstrapping, CRUD edge cases, transactional commit flows under failure, and managing version skew across Spark/Trino/Flink and other clients. Security receives equal weight, covering AuthN/AuthZ boundaries, service principals vs end-user delegation, and resilient OIDC/OAuth2 operations. From there, you’ll learn production deployment patterns, persistence design, object storage integration, HA and capacity planning, concurrency hotspots, and safety controls like rate limits and circuit breakers.
Finally, it operationalizes day-two excellence: SLO-driven observability, audit-quality logging, lifecycle governance, federation boundaries, and disciplined upgrades, migrations, backups, and DR—always with metadata pointer integrity as the north star. Familiarity with Iceberg