Secure Cloud-Based Jupyter Notebooks Access with Okta

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To set up secure cloud-based Jupyter Notebooks with Okta, you'll need the following:

- A cloud environment where your Jupyter server will run, for example, AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
- A domain to which you can associate your server.
- An Okta account to manage authentication.

I will guide you through a Pulumi Python program that creates an EC2 instance where the Jupyter Notebook server will be hosted. It will then set up Okta OAuth as an identity provider to secure access to your Jupyter server.

We'll be using the `pulumi_aws` package to create the AWS infrastructure and the `pulumi_okta` package for setting up Okta OAuth.

Here's an outline of what we'll achieve in this program:

1. Set up an AWS EC2 instance.
2. Associate the EC2 instance with a public IP address for accessibility.
3. Create an Okta OAuth application to delegate authentication.
4. Configure the OAuth application to redirect to the Jupyter Notebook server.

Let's start with the Pulumi program written in Python:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_aws as aws
import pulumi_okta as okta

# Create an EC2 instance for hosting Jupyter Notebook
# Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM) - ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0 (provided as an example, this may differ)
ami = 'ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0'
instance = aws.ec2.Instance('jupyter-notebook-instance',
                            instance_type='t2.micro', # This is a cost-effective instance type, suitable for small workloads
                            ami=ami,
                            tags={
                                'Name': 'JupyterNotebookInstance', 
                            })

# Allocate an Elastic IP for our EC2 instance
eip = aws.ec2.Eip('jupyter-notebook-eip', instance=instance.id)

# Create an OAuth Application in Okta for Jupyter Notebook authentication
# Note that the redirect URIs should be updated to point to the actual Jupyter server URI
oauth_app = okta.app.OAuth(
    'jupyter-notebook-oauth',
    label='Jupyter Notebook OAuth App',
    type='service',  # Use 'service' for machine-to-machine applications,
    grant_types=["authorization_code", "refresh_token"], 
    redirect_uris=[f"http://{eip.public_ip}/oauth/callback"],  # Redirect URI for Jupyter OAuth callback
    response_types=["code"],  # Needed for authorization code flow
    token_endpoint_auth_method="none",  # For the Jupyter server acting as a public client
)

# Export the public IP and Okta application information
pulumi.export('jupyter_notebook_instance_public_ip', eip.public_ip)
pulumi.export('okta_oauth_app_client_id', oauth_app.client_id)
```

In the code above, we create a basic AWS EC2 instance that will host the Jupyter Notebook. We allocate an Elastic IP address to ensure that the instance is accessible over the internet with a fixed IP address.

The `pulumi_okta.app.OAuth` resource is used to create an OAuth service application within Okta which will handle authentication. The OAuth application is configured to use the authorization code grant type, suitable for web-based authentication flows where a user authenticates with Okta and authorizes the Jupyter Notebook application to access their information.

The `redirect_uris` attribute is particularly important: after successful authentication, Okta redirects the user back to the Jupyter server along with an authorization code. This should be configured to the path on your server where you handle the OAuth callback.

This program is a starting point and could be customized with additional AWS resources like security groups, more ec2 instance configurations, and a Jupyter Docker container.

After running this Pulumi program and applying the configuration, you'll have an EC2 instance ready to run a Jupyter Notebook secured with Okta authentication.

To setup the Jupyter Notebook server to use Okta for authentication, you need to configure your JupyterHub to use OAuthenticator, a tool that plugs into JupyterHub and enables authentication via OAuth. You would configure OAuthenticator with the Okta OAuth details such as client id, client secret, and the Okta authorization server URL.

Remember to handle your secrets, such as OAuth application secrets, using secure mechanisms such as Pulumi's secret management. Always consult Okta and AWS security best practices for production deployments.