Hi all, As suggested in the PR 1925 <https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/1925>, I wanted to initiate a discussion for the NO_AUTH support. My apologies for not starting this discussion sooner.
The primary goal is to enable Polaris to federate with catalogs that permit authentication-less access, such as the Hadoop Catalog and Hive Metastore. This is currently a significant gap. For instance, while we've merged support for Hadoop federation (1466) <https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/1466>, it's not practically usable because Hadoop requires either auth-less or Kerberos access—neither of which Polaris currently supports. I propose we tackle this in two phases: 1. *Phase 1: Initial Support:* Implement the core functionality to allow auth-less connections to external catalogs. 2. *Phase 2: Connection Type Validation (Future Enhancement):* Introduce a mapping between connection types and their allowed authentication methods. This would allow Polaris to validate and reject unsupported combinations upfront, providing a cleaner user experience. I believe it's safe to defer Phase 2 because any incorrect connection attempt will still be rejected by the federated catalog's server. Please let me know your thoughts on this approach or if you can think of any alternative ways to support auth-less connections. Thanks, Pooja
