Scalable AI Workload Management with Azure Databricks Workspaces

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Azure Databricks is an analytics platform optimized for the Microsoft Azure cloud services platform. It provides a collaborative environment with a suite of tools for data scientists, engineers, and business analysts to work with large volumes of data and machine learning tasks.

When it comes to AI workload management, Azure Databricks provides a scalable and secure workspace where you can run your big data workloads and machine learning models. It integrates with Azure services such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure Machine Learning.

Here is what the general setup for a scalable AI workload management with Azure Databricks would look like using Pulumi:

1. **Azure Databricks Workspace**: This is the foundational resource for working with Databricks on Azure. It provides the collaborative environment for data science and engineering work.

2. **Managed Resource Group**: An Azure resource group to contain the managed Databricks resources.

3. **Storage**: Configuring blob or data lake storage which will be used by Databricks for storing big data and machine learning models.

4. **Networking**: Setting up networking components if required, such as virtual networks, subnets, network security groups, or private endpoints for secure and private communications.

5. **Security**: Considering options such as customer-managed keys for encryption, enabling encryption of data at rest, or deploying infrastructure within a Virtual Network for enhanced security.

Below is how you could define an Azure Databricks workspace with Pulumi in Python:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_azure_native as azure_native

# Define your workspace name and location (modify these as needed)
databricks_workspace_name = 'my-databricks-workspace'
location = 'East US'

# Define the Managed Resource Group for the Databricks Workspace
managed_rg_name = f"{databricks_workspace_name}-managed-rg"
managed_resource_group = azure_native.resources.ResourceGroup(managed_rg_name,
                                                             location=location)

# Create Azure Databricks Workspace
databricks_workspace = azure_native.databricks.Workspace(resource_name=databricks_workspace_name,
                                                         workspace_name=databricks_workspace_name,
                                                         location=location,
                                                         resource_group_name=managed_resource_group.name,
                                                         sku=azure_native.databricks.SkuArgs(name="standard"),
                                                         managed_resource_group_id=managed_resource_group.id)

# Export the URL of the databricks workspace
pulumi.export('databricks_workspace_url', pulumi.Output.concat("https://", databricks_workspace.workspace_url))

# More configuration related to storage, networking, and security can be added as needed.
```

In this Pulumi program, we:

- Import necessary Pulumi packages.
- Create an Azure Resource Group that will include our Azure Databricks workspace and associated resources.
- Create the Azure Databricks Workspace specifying SKU, managed resource group, and other necessary properties.
- Export the Databricks Workspace URL for easy access.

This setup is elementary and can be extended further. Depending on your specific AI workload needs, such as the region, the size of your data, the number of users, and the required level of security and compliance, you might want to further customize this infrastructure.

For detailed documentation on the Azure Databricks Workspace in Pulumi and other configuration options, you can refer to the [Databricks Workspace documentation](https://www.pulumi.com/registry/packages/azure-native/api-docs/databricks/workspace/).

It's essential to have the Azure account and Pulumi CLI set up before running this code, and you also need to be logged in with sufficient permissions to create resources. Once ready, you can execute this script using `pulumi up`, and it will provision the resources defined in the script.