About Cluster Authentication

Oracle Big Data Cloud provides two authentication mechanisms for clusters. Users can authenticate using HTTP Basic authentication and shared credentials, or they can authenticate using their own identity through Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS). The authentication method a cluster uses is selected when the cluster is created and cannot be changed after cluster creation.

With HTTP Basic authentication, the administrative user name and password for the cluster are specified when the cluster is created. These credentials are then shared with any user who wants to access the cluster. This method is simple but requires the sharing of cluster credentials.

When Oracle Identity Cloud Service is used for cluster authentication, users can access the cluster with their own IDCS identity and credentials, so credentials don’t need to be shared among cluster users. In this case, IDCS is used to manage user accounts and access for the cluster, and all authorization and authentication for the cluster is handled through IDCS.