DDoS Protection for AI APIs

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks can cause significant disruptions to online services. Protecting your APIs, especially if they are related to AI (Artificial Intelligence), is critical because these services often require high availability and consistent performance.

To protect your AI APIs from DDoS attacks, you would typically employ some combination of the following strategies:

1. **Scaling and Redundancy**: By hosting your APIs across multiple servers or in different regions, you can mitigate the impact of a DDoS attempt. If one server gets overwhelmed, others can take over.
2. **Traffic Filtering and Analysis**: Using services that can inspect incoming traffic for signs of DDoS patterns (like sudden spikes in traffic from a single IP address or a group of IP addresses) and filter out malicious traffic.
3. **Cloud DDoS Protection Services**: Public cloud providers offer DDoS protection services you can enable for your cloud infrastructure and applications.

In the context of infrastructure as code, Pulumi allows you to define these protection mechanisms declaratively and manage them as part of your cloud infrastructure.

Below is an example Pulumi program that illustrates how you can use resources from the AWS provider to set up DDoS protection for your AI APIs. In this example, we’ll configure an AWS CloudFront distribution with AWS Shield Advanced for DDoS protection, and deploy an API Gateway that our AI API will utilize.

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_aws as aws

# Create a new Web ACL using AWS WAF to protect the API Gateway
web_acl = aws.wafv2.WebAcl("web-acl",
    scope="REGIONAL",
    default_action={
        "allow": {}
    },
    visibility_config={
        "cloudwatch_metrics_enabled": True,
        "metric_name": "aiApiWebAcl",
        "sampled_requests_enabled": True,
    },
    rules=[{
        "name": "RateLimitRule",
        "priority": 1,
        "action": {
            "block": {}
        },
        "statement": {
            "rate_based_statement": {
                "limit": 1000,
                "aggregate_key_type": "IP"
            }
        },
        "visibility_config": {
            "cloudwatch_metrics_enabled": True,
            "metric_name": "RateLimitRule",
            "sampled_requests_enabled": True,
        }
    }]
)

# Create an API Gateway. Attach the WAF to the API Gateway.
api_gateway = aws.apigatewayv2.Api("apiGateway",
    protocol_type="HTTP",
    route_key="ANY /",
    target=lambda_function.invoke_arn, # Assuming there is a Lambda Function deployed as your AI API
)

# Create a CloudFront distribution with the API Gateway as an origin
distribution = aws.cloudfront.Distribution("cloudFrontDistribution",
    origins=[{
        "domain_name": api_gateway.api_endpoint,
        # The origin ID is a unique identifier that links an origin to a distribution
        "origin_id": api_gateway.id.apply(lambda id: f"apiGatewayOrigin-{id}")
    }],
    enabled=True,
    is_ipv6_enabled=True,
    default_cache_behavior={
        "target_origin_id": api_gateway.id.apply(lambda id: f"apiGatewayOrigin-{id}"),
        "viewer_protocol_policy": "redirect-to-https",
        "allowed_methods": ["GET", "HEAD", "OPTIONS", "PUT", "POST", "PATCH", "DELETE"],
        "cached_methods": ["GET", "HEAD"],
        "forwarded_values": {
            "cookies": {
                "forward": "none"
            },
            "query_string": True
        }
    },
    # Enable AWS Shield Advanced for additional DDoS protection
    # It requires an AWS support plan that provides coverage for Shield Advanced
    web_acl_id=web_acl.arn
)

# Output the CloudFront distribution's domain name for accessing the AI API
pulumi.export("distribution_domain_name", distribution.domain_name)
```

### Explanation

- **WebAcl**: AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is used to create a set of rules, known as a Web ACL, that filters and blocks malicious web traffic. In this example, a rate-limit rule is defined to block IPs that exceed 1000 requests per five minutes, which can be helpful to mitigate layer 7 (application layer) DDoS attacks.
  
- **Api Gateway**: AWS API Gateway is a managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, and monitor APIs. Here, it's assumed that you have an AWS Lambda function that acts as the backend for your AI API. The API Gateway serves as the entry point for your Lambda function.

- **CloudFront Distribution**: Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront also integrates with AWS Shield for DDoS protection. By associating the WAF Web ACL with the CloudFront distribution, the web requests going to your API Gateway are filtered through these rules. Any configured CloudFront behaviors and WAF rules will be applied to incoming traffic, offering additional layers of defense against DDoS attacks.

- **AWS Shield Advanced**: For mission-critical systems, AWS offers AWS Shield Advanced which provides more comprehensive protection against DDoS attacks. This come with additional cost and usually requires an enterprise support plan with AWS.

Keep in mind that this simplified example is meant to give you an idea of how infrastructure as code can be used to define DDoS protection. The actual implementation for your specific application might require additional considerations, such as more refined WAF rules or the integration of other AWS services, depending on your architecture and needs.