Authentik and CoreWeave Collaborate to Streamline Onboarding for an AI/ML Developer Hackathon

Key benefits from the Authentik and CoreWeave collaboration:

• Onboarded ~300 participants to CoreWeave Cloud in less than one hour
• Secured access to up to 300 NVIDIA A40 GPU for 24 hours
• Created simple and unique development environments for AI fine-tuning and collaboration
• Minimized the event host’s time spent on support and maintenance

When a leading AI lab, Mistral AI, needed compute resources to host an action-packed, 24-hour hackathon, CoreWeave volunteered compute resources and engineering support. While many attendees were not new to Kubernetes, they were new to the CoreWeave platform. 

That meant CoreWeave and the event host needed an efficient, simple, and secure way to onboard developers and give them access to compute inside developer environments for the event. With this type of fast-paced event, it’s crucial that all energy and brain power are spent on coding, hacking, and demo-ing—not on logging-in participants or running the infrastructure.

Challenges:

• Limited access to compute at major cloud providers for an on-demand, one-day event
• Onboarding ~300 participants on NVIDIA GPU-accelerated environments for a hackathon 
• Need to maintain secure access so that teams cannot interfere with each other
• A process to easily account for last-minute attendees and change requests

Approach

To help streamline the verification and onboarding process for this one-day event, CoreWeave turned to Authentik Security for help creating a unique provisioning and authentication process.

Authentik is an open-source identity provider for enterprises focused on flexibility and versatility. The platform allows clients to easily integrate upstream identities, such as GitHub, for provisioning access to downstream applications and services.

CoreWeave already collaborates with large AI enterprises to deploy Authentik as an essential authentication and authorization tool deployed to large AI enterprises. This hackathon event required a more unique use of Authentik, extending its capabilities with its industry-leading customizability.

“We had three main goals for supporting this hackathon: Make it easy, make it scalable, and make it secure. Authentik checked all three of those boxes and ensured getting access to compute was a non-issue for any number of participants.”

— Jacob Feldman,  Solutions Architect at CoreWeave

With help from the Authentik team, CoreWeave was able to create a robust and reliable system in just under 2 weeks.

1. Event organizers managed everything on GitHub 
2. Authentik federated login through GitHub teams
3. Pods were dynamically provisioned on the backend by CoreWeave using  Argo Events
4. Kubernetes spun-up the new environments for developers in CoreWeave 
5. Authentik’s configurable Flow system routed users to specific environments

The hackathon portal utilized GitHub team membership and Authentik’s proxy provider to create a simple proxy-based gateway for access to compute. 

On events emitted from Authentik’s native notification system, a pre-provisioned Argo Events instance, running inside the Kubernetes cluster, spun up pods for contestants to access. The pods, running the VS Code web interface, exposed a fully featured VS Code environment, complete with team-shared storage for collaboration and iteration. 

Authentik’s Flow system, allowing for fulllots of customization, was critical to enable dynamic backend selection so that specific users were routed to their own personal and persistent environments.

Results

The collaboration with Authentik Security proved to be the linchpin for a successful hackathon. CoreWeave and Authentik created an entirely web-based and seamless development environment for GPU-accelerated workloads. This solution allowed the event hosts to: 

• Onboard 100 developers to CoreWeave in less than one hour
• Manage registration simply by adjusting GitHub users’ organization and team settings
• Secure access to up to 300 NVIDIA A40 GPU nodes for 24 hours
• Minimize time spent on support and maintenance

Above all, a hackathon with simple and streamlined access to compute meant one important thing: Developers could spend more time focusing on the event and less time on logistics.

“Our goal at Authentik Security is to integrate identity seamlessly and securely for every customer’s need. We enjoyed working with the CoreWeave team to help support this hackathon, as well as our ongoing work to support some of their larger clients.”

— Fletcher Heisler, CEO at Authentik Security

More about Authentik

When it comes to protecting access to precious information and tools—like your AI cluster—Authentik ensures you’re in good hands.

Authentik offers a secure, flexible solution to self-hosted identity and access management, allowing organizations of all sizes to take control of their identity needs. With over 200,000 installations worldwide, Authentik excels with at-scale deployments that ensure enterprises can remain compliant and operate with 100% reliability. Built to work with modern DevOps tooling, its APIs and fully customizable policies allow customers to automate any workflow.

From its beginnings as an open source project in 2018, Authentik has grown to support the complex identity needs of leading organizations. Its code is continuously reviewed by experts in the community, and the team prioritizes security from design to code, testing, and maintenance.

This flexibility, commitment to open source, and eagerness for collaboration made Authentik a clear choice for CoreWeave as a partner in the cloud.  Learn more about Authentik on its website, and reach out to your CoreWeave representative for more information about deploying AI workloads in the cloud.

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