Open Data Infrastructure
Lakekeeper Catalog Account Recovery Runbooks
How Lakekeeper recovery runbooks cover catalog identities, warehouse boundaries, credentials, audit trails, and owner review.
Catalog account recovery is where access control becomes an operations problem.
Recovery starts with the catalog surface
Lakekeeper documentation describes projects, warehouses, users, roles, permissions, storage profiles, credentials, and management APIs. That is a large recovery surface. If account recovery only means resetting a password, the runbook is too small.
A catalog account can affect warehouse access, credential vending, namespace ownership, table access, and audit trails. Recovery needs to restore access without expanding authority beyond the original boundary.
A runbook needs identity and warehouse context
The runbook should identify the affected principal, roles, warehouses, namespaces, storage credentials, and dependent engines. It should record who requested recovery, who approved it, which privileges changed, and how the team will prove the recovered account did not inherit extra access.
Lakekeeper warehouse boundaries matter because a warehouse ties catalog behavior to a storage location and credentials. Account recovery that ignores that boundary can accidentally turn an identity issue into cross-warehouse exposure.
Core idea: recovery is not safe unless it restores the old boundary, not merely access.
The ODI pattern treats recovery as evidence
Open Data Infrastructure is not only about steady-state access. It is about what happens when access breaks. A recovery workflow should leave evidence that policy, ownership, and warehouse boundaries still mean what they meant before the incident.
Read Lakekeeper warehouse boundaries, Lakekeeper namespace design, and Lakekeeper disaster recovery drills for the surrounding operating model.
What breaks first
The failure mode is usually overcorrection. Access breaks, everyone panics, and the fix grants too much.
- A temporary admin grant becomes permanent.
- A recovered service account can reach warehouses it never owned.
- Storage credentials are rotated without updating dependent engines.
- Audit history shows a change but not the reason or approval.
Questions to ask during recovery
Ask what access the account had before the incident, what access it needs now, which warehouses are affected, which credentials must rotate, and which audit record will prove the recovery stayed inside policy.
A good recovery runbook should be calm enough to follow during an outage and strict enough to prevent a bigger one.
Sources to start with
These primary sources anchor the technical claims in this guide.
- Lakekeeper Management API documentation
- Lakekeeper concepts documentation
- Lakekeeper authorization with Cedar documentation
- Lakekeeper authorization with OpenFGA documentation
The recovery goal is not restored access. It is restored control.