Managed Identity for AI Platform Authentication

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Managed identity in cloud platforms is a feature that allows you to authenticate services and resources without managing credentials in your code. It essentially provides an identity for services to interact with other services in the cloud platform with the necessary permissions, using the platform's IAM (Identity and Access Management).

For the purpose of this illustration, I'll demonstrate how to create a Managed Identity in Azure, which is known as a Service Principal, and configure it to authenticate to an Azure AI service (assume an Azure Cognitive Service for simplicity).

We'll use the `azure-native` Pulumi provider, as it is the most up-to-date and idiomatic provider for working with Azure resources in Pulumi.

First, we'll create a Managed Identity (Service Principal) in Azure AD, register it with Azure and then assign it the role 'Cognitive Services Contributor', which allows the identity to manage and access Azure Cognitive Services.

Here's how to create and set up the Managed Identity using Pulumi:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_azure_native as azure_native

# Create a new Managed Identity (Service Principal).
managed_identity = azure_native.authorization.ServicePrincipal("MyAIManagedIdentity")

# Create a role assignment for the Managed Identity.
# This role assignment grants the identity 'Cognitive Services Contributor' role,
# which allows managing and accessing Azure Cognitive Services.
role_assignment = azure_native.authorization.RoleAssignment("MyAIManagedIdentityRoleAssignment",
    principal_id=managed_identity.id,
    role_definition_id=pulumi.Output.concat("/subscriptions/", pulumi.get_stack_reference("current").require_output("subscriptionId"), "/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/"),
    scope=pulumi.Config(require("targetScope"))  # Specify the scope at which this role applies, e.g., resource group or the entire subscription.
)

# Output the ID of the Managed Identity and the Role Assignment.
pulumi.export("managedIdentityId", managed_identity.id)
pulumi.export("roleAssignmentId", role_assignment.id)
```

Please note, in the provided code example:

1. `pulumi_azure_native.authorization.ServicePrincipal` is used to create a new Service Principal which serves as a Managed Identity in Azure. The `ServicePrincipal` class is from the `azure-native` Pulumi provider, which enables us to work with native Azure resources.

2. `pulumi_azure_native.authorization.RoleAssignment` is used to create a new role assignment that grants the specified permissions to our Managed Identity. The role we're assigning is a 'Cognitive Services Contributor' which will allow the Managed Identity to manage and access Azure Cognitive Services.

3. `pulumi.export` is used to output the ID of the Managed Identity and the Role Assignment for later reference, these IDs can be used in other parts of your cloud infrastructure where the authentication of the AI services is required.

To actually deploy this code, it should be part of a full Pulumi Python project and you'll need to setup your Pulumi and Azure CLI environments. Once your environments are set up, you can run `pulumi up` to deploy your Managed Identity and configure its role assignment as described.

Keep in mind that Azure Cognitive Services and some other configurations like setting up the service connection, proper role IDs, and scope might vary based on your specific use case and environment. You will need to replace the placeholders such as `"targetScope"` with actual values that are applicable to your environment.