It is mandatory for now. Quoting @ebergenholtz "...in HDP 2.3x, Atlas is required to be running in order for the Hive post execution hook for Atlas to fire properly since it is using a REST API to propagate the metadata. This limitation is being addressed by introducing a messaging layer which decouples Atlas from Hive such that the state of the Atlas process does not affect the execution of Hive queries." Source: https://community.hortonworks.com/questions/22396/ranger-dependency-on-atlas.html The above also applies to HDP 2.4 and will be addressed with the coming release of HDP ... View more