Technology

Lakekeeper

Lakekeeper is an open-source (Apache-2.0), **Rust-native Apache Iceberg REST Catalog**. Where the incumbent catalogs grew out of JVM/Hive-metastore lineage, Lakekeeper scales horizontally with no garbage-collection overhead — but its defining feature is **embedded Cedar policy enforcement**: it evaluates user *and agent* identities against declarative ABAC/RBAC policies and vends **short-lived, remote-signed storage credentials**, so data authorization cannot be bypassed by a rogue compute engine or a compromised agent.

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Definition

What it is

Lakekeeper is an open-source (Apache-2.0), **Rust-native Apache Iceberg REST Catalog**. Where the incumbent catalogs grew out of JVM/Hive-metastore lineage, Lakekeeper scales horizontally with no garbage-collection overhead — but its defining feature is **embedded Cedar policy enforcement**: it evaluates user *and agent* identities against declarative ABAC/RBAC policies and vends **short-lived, remote-signed storage credentials**, so data authorization cannot be bypassed by a rogue compute engine or a compromised agent.

Why it exists

Lakekeeper is a control plane over [Apache Iceberg](/node/apache-iceberg) tables on object storage — it sits in the [Iceberg REST Catalog](/node/iceberg-rest-catalog-spec) convergence alongside [Apache Polaris](/node/apache-polaris), [Unity Catalog](/node/unity-catalog), [Apache Gravitino](/node/apache-gravitino), and Nessie. Its differentiator is being the **security catalog** of the agentic data control plane: when the querying identity is an autonomous agent, per-request policy evaluation and scoped credential vending are what keep an agent from reading or mutating data it shouldn't.

Primary use cases

central Iceberg REST catalog for multi-engine lakehouses (Spark, Trino, PyIceberg, Flink); identity-aware access control for agents and engines; short-lived scoped storage-credential vending; self-hosted, GC-free catalog at scale.

Recent developments

Latest signals
  • Cedar policy enforcement in the catalog (v0.12.x). Lakekeeper integrates AWS's open-source Cedar policy engine directly into the Iceberg REST catalog, evaluating ABAC/RBAC rules per request and issuing short-lived remote-signed credentials — the pattern the 2026 "agentic data control plane" blueprint centers its security layer on. Per Lakekeeper Cedar authorization docs and Lakekeeper (GitHub).
  • Rust-native, horizontally scalable REST catalog. No JVM, no GC pauses; positioned as the lightweight, high-concurrency alternative for lakehouses standardizing on the Iceberg REST spec. Per Lakekeeper docs and building a modern lakehouse with Lakekeeper + Trino (OLake).

Connections 6

Outbound 6
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Object Storage
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Iceberg REST Catalog Spec
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Apache Iceberg
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Apache PolarisUnity Catalog
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Vendor Lock-In

Featured in

2026-07-05 The Frontier Moved Again — and the Floor Compounded In June we argued the AI stack had split into a closed, expensive frontier and an open, cheap floor. Six weeks later the frontier proved the point the hard way: Claude Fable 5 was pulled offline for 19 days by an export-control order, then restored with a retention mandate that quietly bars the most sensitive data from ever touching it. Meanwhile the floor didn't just hold — it compounded. Object storage got RDMA-fast, the query engines converged on one substrate, and the data plane grew a control plane built for agents instead of humans. This is the field report.