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Apache Polaris¶
Apache Polaris™ is an open-source implementation of the Iceberg REST Catalog protocol — a managed HTTP service that owns the mapping from logical table name → current Iceberg snapshot pointer + schema + partition spec + ACL metadata. Originated as Snowflake Open Catalog and subsequently open-sourced as an Apache project.
Role on the wiki¶
Polaris appears across the Redpanda lakehouse corpus as one of four named managed / open-source REST catalogs Redpanda products integrate with alongside Databricks Unity Catalog, AWS Glue, and GCP BigLake. The Snowflake Open Catalog hosted form is the commercial peer of the OSS Polaris project.
Stub scope¶
This page is a minimal anchor. Named across the Redpanda Iceberg corpus as a REST-catalog integration target but not given a dedicated wiki home until the 2026-03-05 Iceberg output launch post explicitly worked its OAuth2 client-credentials flow in the canonical YAML example (Source: sources/2026-03-05-redpanda-introducing-iceberg-output-for-redpanda-connect).
Integration surface¶
Speaks the standard Iceberg REST Catalog API.
Authentication is typically OAuth2 client-credentials; per-tenant
isolation is idiomatic (one realm / warehouse per tenant). The
Redpanda Connect iceberg output's example config points at a
Polaris instance via:
catalog:
url: https://polaris.example.com/api/catalog
warehouse: analytics
auth:
oauth2:
client_id: "${CATALOG_CLIENT_ID}"
client_secret: "${CATALOG_CLIENT_SECRET}"
Seen in¶
- Redpanda — Introducing Iceberg output for Redpanda Connect (2026-03-05) — canonical wiki worked-example of Polaris as the REST-catalog endpoint for a Redpanda Connect Iceberg sink, with OAuth2 client-credentials auth and per-tenant isolation cited as the enterprise-governance substrate.
- Redpanda — 25.1 Iceberg Topics GA (2025-04-07) — named alongside Unity Catalog and AWS Glue as a supported managed REST catalog.
- Redpanda — Streaming as AI-native data-platform backbone (2025-06-24) — positioned as the OSS REST catalog enabling cross-engine access to the same Iceberg dataset without storing data twice (Snowflake + BigQuery via Polaris).
Related¶
- systems/apache-iceberg
- systems/snowflake — Snowflake Open Catalog is the hosted form
- systems/unity-catalog, systems/aws-glue, systems/google-biglake — other REST-catalog peers
- systems/redpanda-iceberg-topics, systems/redpanda-connect-iceberg-output — producers registering against Polaris
- concepts/iceberg-catalog-rest-sync