User-assigned Managed Identities for Secure AI Experimentation Workspaces

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Managed identities in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) are an Azure feature that provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure AD. You can use this identity to authenticate to any service that supports Azure AD authentication, without having credentials in your code.

In the context of AI experimentation workspaces like Azure Machine Learning, you can use managed identities to securely connect to different Azure resources like storage accounts, key vaults, or databases without storing sensitive credentials in your codebase. User-assigned managed identities can be shared across multiple resources, which is useful in environments where you want multiple services to have the same identity for accessing other services.

Pulumi allows you to orchestrate your cloud infrastructure with real programming languages. You can define all your cloud resources in code and version it alongside your application code. Below is a Pulumi Python program that demonstrates how to create a user-assigned managed identity and assign it to an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster, which could serve as part of an AI experimentation workspace.

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_azure_native as azure_native

# Create a user-assigned managed identity
user_assigned_identity = azure_native.managedidentity.UserAssignedIdentity(
    "aiWorkspaceIdentity",
    resource_group_name="your_resource_group"  # Replace with your resource group name
)

# Create an AKS cluster and attach the user-assigned managed identity
aks_cluster = azure_native.containerservice.ManagedCluster(
    "aiWorkspaceAksCluster",
    resource_group_name=user_assigned_identity.resource_group_name,
    # Provide more AKS configurations as needed
    identity=azure_native.containerservice.ManagedClusterIdentityArgs(
        type="UserAssigned",
        user_assigned_identities={
            user_assigned_identity.id: azure_native.containerservice.ManagedClusterIdentityUserAssignedIdentitiesArgs()
        }
    )
)

# Export the ID of the managed identity and the AKS cluster
pulumi.export("user_assigned_identity_id", user_assigned_identity.id)
pulumi.export("aks_cluster_name", aks_cluster.name)
```

Here's what each part of the code is doing:

1. We import the required Pulumi modules for interacting with Azure.
2. We create a `UserAssignedIdentity` that represents the user-assigned managed identity in Azure AD.
3. We create a `ManagedCluster` resource representing an AKS cluster. In the `identity` property of the AKS resource, we specify that we are using a user-assigned identity by setting the type to `"UserAssigned"`, and we reference our previously created managed identity.
4. Finally, we export the IDs of both the user-assigned identity and the AKS cluster. This allows you to retrieve these values from the Pulumi CLI or integrate them with other services.

Remember to replace `"your_resource_group"` with the name of the Azure resource group that you want to use.

You need to have the Azure Pulumi provider set up and configured with the necessary permissions to create these resources in Azure. Also, ensure that the managed identity has the right permissions to interact with other resources you'll use within your workspace.

Please take into account that this is a simplified demonstration to get you started. Depending on the actual services and configuration you are planning to use in your workspace, you may need to adjust the properties and include additional resources and settings.