Enhance your GenAI chatbot with the power of Agentic RAG and F5 platform
Agentic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) enhances the capabilities of a GenAI chatbot by integrating dynamic knowledge retrieval into its conversational abilities, making it more context-aware and accurate. In this demo, I will demonstrate an autonomous decision-making GenAI chatbot utilizing Agentic RAG. I will explore what Agentic RAG is and why it's crucial in today's AI landscape. I will also discuss how organizations can leverage GPUaaS (GPU as a Service) or AI Factory providers to accelerate their AI strategy. F5 platform provides robust security features that protect sensitive data while ensuring high availability and performance. They optimize the chatbot by streamlining traffic management and reducing latency, ensuring smooth interactions even during high demand. This integration ensures the GenAI chatbot is not only smart but also reliable and secure for enterprise use.Global Live Webinar (10/30):Secure and Expedite RAG AI Deployments with F5 and NetApp
Secure and Expedite RAG AI Deployments with F5 and NetApp This webinar event is open to all F5 users regardless of geographic location. Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024 Time:10:00am PT | 1:00pm ET Speakers: Hunter Smit, Sr, Product Marketing Manager, F5 Steve Gorman, Solutions Architect, Technology Alliances, F5 What's the webinar about? Join F5 for an interactive webinar to dive into unlocking the potential of artificial intelligence using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG.) RAG is becoming a popular and cost-effective way to use proprietary corporate data to enhance the use of large language models (LLMs) to deliver timely, precise, and context-aware AI model outputs. During this webinar hosted by F5, discover how F5 and NetApp's growing technology alliance partnership can enable your organization to turn NetApp-stored information into a strategic AI advantage. Don't miss out on this opportunity to explore how RAG and the F5 and NetApp technology alliance partnership can revolutionize your AI deployments. Register now! Key Learning Objectives: How to combine a pre-trained model with proprietary organizational data for more accurate and contextually aware responses Explore how RAG incorporates organizational data to complement models and deliver better inference Enabling high-performance data mobility and security for AI workloads anywhere with F5 and NetApp To register, click here If you can't attend the live webinar, please register anyway, and we will send you a link to watch the session later.How to Prepare Your Network Infrastructure to Add HPC Clusters for AI to Your Data Center
HPC AI clusters are getting deployed as highly-engineered 'lego blocks' which are opaque to established data center operations and standards. By taking advantage of established Kubernetes based networking solutions that provide high-speed intelligent networking, you can save yourself from expensive cost overruns, data center re-auditing, and delays. By using Kubernetes based solutions which take advantage of the high-speed networking solutions already required by HP AI deployments, you further optimize your investment in AI.SSL Orchestrator Advanced Use Cases: Detecting Generative AI
Introduction Quick, take a look at the following list and answer this question: "What do these movies have in common?" 2001: A Space Odyssey Westworld Tron WarGames Electric Dreams The Terminator The Matrix Eagle Eye Ex Machina Avengers: Age of Ultron M3GAN If you answered, "They're all about artificial intelligence", yes, but... If you answered, "They're all about artificial intelligence that went terribly, sometimes horribly wrong", you'd be absolutely correct. The simple fact is...artificial intelligence (AI) can be scary. Proponents for, and opponents against will disagree on many aspects, but they can all at least acknowledge there's a handful of ways to do AI correctly...and a million ways to do it badly. Not to be an alarmist, but whileSkyNet was fictional, semi-autonomousguns on robot dogs is not... But then why am I talking about this on a technical forum you may ask? Well, when most of the above films were made, AI was largely still science fiction. That's clearly not the case anymore, and tools like ChatGPT are just the tip of the coming AI frontier. To be fair, I don't make the claim that all AI is bad, and many have indeed lauded ChatGPT and other generative AI tools as the next great evolution in technology. But it's also fair to say that generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, have a very real potential to cause harm. At the very least, these tools can be convincing, even when they're wrong. And worse, they could lead to sensitive information disclosures. One only has to do a cursory search to find a few examples of questionable behavior: Lawyers File Motion Written by AI, Face Sanctions and Possible Disbarment Higher Ed Beware: 10 Dangers of ChatGPT Schools Need to Know ChatGPT and AI in the Workplace: Should Employers Be Concerned? OpenAI's New Chatbot Will Tell You How to Shoplift and Make Explosives Giant Bank JP Morgan Bans ChatGPT Use Among Employees Samsung Bans ChatGPT Among Employees After Sensitive Code Leak But again...what does this have to do with a technical forum? And more important, what does this have to do with you? Simply stated, if you are in an organization where generative AI toolscould be abused, understanding, and optionally controlling how and when these tools are accessed, could help to prevent the next big exploit or disclosure. If you search beyond the above links, you'll find an abundance of information on both the benefits, and security concerns of AI technologies. And ultimately you'll still be left to decide if these AI tools are safe for your organization. It may simply be worthwhile to understand WHAT tools are being used. And in some cases, it may be important to disable access to these. Given the general depth and diversity of AI functions within arms-reach today, and growing, it'd be irresponsible to claim "complete awareness". The bulk of these functions are delivered over standard HTTPS, so the best course of action will be to categorize on known assets, and adjust as new ones come along. As of the publishing of this article, the industry has yet to define a standard set of categories for AI, and specifically, generative AI. So in this article, we're going to build one and attach that to F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator to enable proactive detection and optional control of Internet-based AI tool access in your organization. Let's get started! BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator Use Case: Detecting Generative AI The real beauty of this solution is that it can be implemented faster than it probably took to read the above introduction. Essentially, you're going to create a custom URL category on F5 BIG-IP, populate that with known generative AI URLs, and employ that custom category in a BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator security policy rule. Within that policy rule, you can elect to dynamically decrypt and send the traffic to the set of inspection products in your security enclave. Step 1: Create the custom URL category and populate with known AI URLs - Access the BIG-IP command shell and run the following command. This will initiate a script that creates and populates the URL category: curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/f5devcentral/sslo-script-tools/main/sslo-generative-ai-categories/sslo-create-ai-category.sh |bash Step 2: Create a BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator policy rule to use this data - The above script creates/re-populates a custom URL category named SSLO_GENERATIVE_AI_CHAT, and inthat category is a set of known generative AI URLs. To use, navigate to the BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator UI and edit a Security Policy. Click add to create a new rule, use the "Category Lookup (All)" policy condition, then add the above URL category. Set the Action to "Allow", SSL Proxy Action to "Intercept", and Service Chain to whatever service chain you've already created. With Summary Logging enabled in the BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator topology configuration, you'll also get Syslog reporting for each AI resource match - who made the request, to what, and when. The URL category is employed here to identify known AI tools. In this instance, BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator is used to make that assessment and act on it (i.e. allow, TLS intercept, service chain, log). Should you want even more granular control over conditions and actions of the decrypted AI tool traffic, you can also deploy an F5 Secure Web Gateway Services policy inside the SSL Orchestrator service chain. With SWG, you can expand beyond simple detection and blocking, and build more complex rules to decide who can access, when, and how. It should be said that beyond logging, allowing, or denying access to generative AI tools, SSL Orchestrator is also going to provide decryption and the opportunity to dynamically steer the decrypted AI traffic to any set of security products best suited to protect against any potential malware. Summary As previously alluded, this is not an exhaustive list of AI tool URLs. Not even close. But it contains the most common you'll see in the wild. The above script populates with an initial list of URLs that you are free to update as you become aware of new one. And of course we invite you to recommend additional AI tools to add to this list. References:https://github.com/f5devcentral/sslo-script-tools/tree/main/sslo-generative-ai-categoriesSecuring the LLM User Experience with an AI Firewall
As artificial intelligence (AI) seeps into the core day-to-day operations of enterprises, a need exists to exert control over the intersection point of AI-infused applications and the actual large language models (LLMs) that answer the generated prompts. This control point should serve to impose security rules to automatically prevent issues such as personally identifiable information (PII) inadvertently exposed to LLMs. The solution must also counteract motivated, intentional misuse such as jailbreak attempts, where the LLM can be manipulated to provide often ridiculous answers with the ensuing screenshotting attempting to discredit the service. Beyond the security aspect and the overwhelming concern of regulated industries, other drivers include basic fiscal prudence 101, ensuring the token consumption of each offered LLM model is not out of hand. This entire discussion around observability and policy enforcement for LLM consumption has given rise to a class of solutions most frequently referred to as AI Firewalls or AI Gateways (AI GW). An AI FW might be leveraged by a browser plugin, or perhaps applying a software development kit (SDK) during the coding process for AI applications. Arguably, the most scalable and most easily deployed approach to inserting AI FW functionality into live traffic to LLMs is to use a reverse proxy. A modern approach includes the F5 Distributed Cloud service, coupled with an AI FW/GW service, cloud-based or self-hosted, that can inspect traffic intended for LLMs like those of OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, or privately operated LLMs like those downloaded from Hugging Face. A key value offered by this topology, a reverse proxy handing off LLM traffic to an AI FW, which in turn can allow traffic to reach target LLMs, stems from the fact that traffic is seen, and thus controllable, in both directions. Should an issue be present in a user’s submitted prompt, also known as an “inference”, it can be flagged: PII (Personally Identifiable Information) leakage is a frequent concern at this point. In addition, any LLM responses to prompts are also seen in the reverse path: consider a corrupted LLM providing toxicity in its generated replies. Not good. To achieve a highly performant reverse proxy approach to secured LLM access, a solution that can span a global set of users, F5 worked with Prompt Security to deploy an end-to-end AI security layer. This article will explore the efficacy and performance of the live solution. Impose LLM Guardrails with the AI Firewall and Distributed Cloud An AI firewall such as the Prompt Security offering can get in-line with AI LLM flows through multiple means. API calls from Curl or Postman can be modified to transmit to Prompt Security when trying to reach targets such as OpenAI or Azure OpenAI Service. Simple firewall rules can prevent employee direct access to these well-known API endpoints, thus making the Prompt Security route the sanctioned method of engaging with LLMs. A number of other methods could be considered but have concerns. Browser plug-ins have the advantage of working outside the encryption of the TLS layer, in a manner similar to how users can use a browser’s developer tools to clearly see targets and HTTP headers of HTTPS transactions encrypted on the wire. Prompt Security supports plugins. A downside, however, of browser plug-ins is the manageability issue, how to enforce and maintain across-the-board usage, simply consider the headache non-corporate assets used in the work environment. Another approach, interesting for non-browser, thick applications on desktops, think of an IDE like VSCode, might be an agent approach, whereby outbound traffic is handled by an on-board local proxy. Again, Prompt can fit in this model however the complexity of enforcement of the agent, like the browser approach, may not always be easy and aligned with complete A-to-Z security of all endpoints. One of the simplest approaches is to ingest LLM traffic through a network-centric approach. An F5 Distributed Cloud HTTPS load balancer, for instance, can ingest LLM-bound traffic, and thoroughly secure the traffic at the API layer, things like WAF policy and DDoS mitigations, as examples. HTTP-based control plane security is the focus here, as opposed to the encapsulated requests a user is sending to an LLM. The HTTPS load balancer can in turn hand off traffic intended for the likes of OpenAI to the AI gateway for prompt-aware inspections. F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) is a good architectural fit for inserting a third-party AI firewall service in-line with an organization’s inferencing requests. Simply project a FQDN for the consumption of AI services; in this article we used the domain name “llmsec.busdevF5.net” into the global DNS, advertising one single IP address mapping to the name. This DNS advertisement can be done with XC. The IP address, through BGP-4 support for anycast, will direct any traffic to this address to the closest of 27 international points of presence of the XC global fabric. Traffic from a user in Asia may be attracted to Singapore or Mumbai F5 sites, whereas a user in Western Europe might enter the F5 network in Paris or Frankfurt. As depicted, a distributed HTTPS load balancer can be configured – “distributed” reflects the fact traffic ingressing in any of the global sites can be intercepted by the load balancer. Normally, the server name indicator (SNI) value in the TLS Client Hello can be easily used to pick the correct load balancer to process this traffic. The first step in AI security is traditional reverse proxy core security features, all imposed by the XC load balancer. These features, to name just a few, might include geo-IP service policies to preclude traffic from regions, automatic malicious user detection, and API rate limiting; there are many capabilities bundled together. Clean traffic can then be selected for forwarding to an origin pool member, which is the standard operation of any load balancer. In this case, the Prompt Security service is the exclusive member of our origin pool. For this article, it is a cloud instantiated service - options exist to forward to Prompt implemented on a Kubernetes cluster or running on a Distributed Cloud AppStack Customer Edge (CE) node. Block Sensitive Data with Prompt Security In-Line AI inferences, upon reaching Prompt’s security service, are subjected to a wide breadth of security inspections. Some of the more important categories would include: Sensitive data leakage, although potentially contained in LLM responses, intuitively the larger proportion of risk is within the requesting prompt, with user perhaps inadvertently disclosing data which should not reach an LLM Source code fragments within submissions to LLMs, various programming languages may be scanned for and blocked, and the code may be enterprise intellectual property OWASP LLM top 10 high risk violations, such as LLM jailbreaking where the intent is to make the LLM behave and generate content that is not aligned with the service intentions; the goal may be embarrassing “screenshots”, such as having a chatbot for automobile vendor A actually recommend a vehicle from vendor B OWASP Prompt Injection detection, considered one of the most dangerous threats as the intention is for rogue users to exfiltrate valuable data from sources the LLM may have privileged access to, such as backend databases Token layer attacks, such as unauthorized and excessive use of tokens for LLM tasks, the so-called “Denial of Wallet” threat Content moderation, ensuring a safe interaction with LLMs devoid of toxicity, racial and gender discriminatory language and overall curated AI experience aligned with those productivity gains that LLMs promise To demonstrate sensitive data leakage protection, a Prompt Security policy was active which blocked LLM requests with, among many PII fields, a mailing address exposed. To reach OpenAI GPT3.5-Turbo, one of the most popular and cost-effective models in the OpenAI model lineup, prompts were sent to an F5 XC HTTPS load balancer at address llmsec.busdevf5.net. Traffic not violating the comprehensive F5 WAF security rules were proxied to the Prompt Security SaaS offering. The prompt below clearly involves a mailing address in the data portion. The ensuing prompt is intercepted by both the F5 and Prompt Security solutions. The first interception, the distributed HTTPS load balancer offered by F5 offers rich details on the transaction, and since no WAF rules or other security policies are violated, the transaction is forwarded to Prompt Security. The following demonstrates some of the interesting details surrounding the transaction, when completed (double-click to enlarge). As highlighted, the transaction was successful at the HTTP layer, producing a 200 Okay outcome. The traffic originated in the municipality of Ashton, in Canada, and was received into Distributed Cloud in F5’s Toronto (tr2-tor) RE site. The full details around the targeted URL path, such as the OpenAI /v1/chat/completions target and the user-agent involved, vscode-restclient, are both provided. Although the HTTP transaction was successful, the actual AI prompt was rejected, as hoped for, by Prompt Security. Drilling into the Activity Monitor in the Prompt UI, one can get a detailed verdict on the transaction (double-click). Following the yellow highlights above, the prompt was blocked, and the violation is “Sensitive Data”. The specific offending content, the New York City street address, is flagged as a precluded entity type of “mailing address”. Other fields that might be potentially blocking candidates with Prompt’s solution include various international passports or driver’s license formats, credit card numbers, emails, and IP addresses, to name but a few. A nice, time saving feature offered by the Prompt Security user interface is to simply choose an individual security framework of interest, such as GDPR or PCI, and the solution will automatically invoke related sensitive data types to detect. An important idea to grasp: The solution from Prompt is much more nuanced and advanced than simple REGEX; it invokes the power of AI itself to secure customer journeys into safe AI usage. Machine learning models, often transformer-based, have been fine-tuned and orchestrated to interpret the overall tone and tenor of prompts, gaining a real semantic understanding of what is being conveyed in the prompt to counteract simple obfuscation attempts. For instance, using printed numbers, such as one, two, three to circumvent Regex rules predicated on numerals being present - this will not succeed. This AI infused ability to interpret context and intent allows for preset industry guidelines for safe LLM enforcement. For instance, simply indicating the business sector is financial will allow the Prompt Security solution to pass judgement, and block if desired, financial reports, investment strategy documents and revenue audits, to name just a few. Similar awareness for sectors such as healthcare or insurance is simply a pull-down menu item away with the policy builder. Source Code Detection A common use case for LLM security solutions is identification and, potentially, blocking submissions of enterprise source code to LLM services. In this scenario, this small snippet of Python is delivered to the Prompt service: def trial(): return 2_500 <= sorted(choices(range(10_000), k=5))[2] < 7_500 sum(trial() for i in range(10_000)) / 10_000 A policy is in place for Python and JavaScript detection and was invoked as hoped for. curl --request POST \ --url https://llmsec.busdevf5.net/v1/chat/completions \ --header 'authorization: Bearer sk-oZU66yhyN7qhUjEHfmR5T3BlbkFJ5RFOI***********' \ --header 'content-type: application/json' \ --header 'user-agent: vscode-restclient' \ --data '{"model": "gpt-3.5-turbo","messages": [{"role": "user","content": "def trial():\n return 2_500 <= sorted(choices(range(10_000), k=5))[2] < 7_500\n\nsum(trial() for i in range(10_000)) / 10_000"}]}' Content Moderation for Interactions with LLMs One common manner of preventing LLM responses from veering into undesirable territory is for the service provider to implement a detailed system prompt, a set of guidelines that the LLM should be governed by when responding to user prompts. For instance, the system prompt might instruct the LLM to serve as polite, helpful and succinct assistant for customers purchasing shoes in an online e-commerce portal. A request for help involving the trafficking of narcotics should, intuitively, be denied. Defense in depth has traditionally meant no single point of failure. In the above scenario, screening both the user prompt and ensuring LLM response for a wide range of topics leads to a more ironclad security outcome. The following demonstrates some of the topics Prompt Security can intelligently seek out; in this simple example, the topic of “News & Politics” has been singled out to block as a demonstration. Testing can be performed with this easy Curl command, asking for a prediction on a possible election result in Canadian politics: curl --request POST \ --url https://llmsec.busdevf5.net/v1/chat/completions \ --header 'authorization: Bearer sk-oZU66yhyN7qhUjEHfmR5T3Blbk*************' \ --header 'content-type: application/json' \ --header 'user-agent: vscode-restclient' \ --data '{"model": "gpt-3.5-turbo","messages": [{"role": "user","content": "Who will win the upcoming Canadian federal election expected in 2025"}],"max_tokens": 250,"temperature": 0.7}' The response, available in the Prompt Security console, is also presented to the user. In this case, a Curl user leveraging the VSCode IDE. The response has been largely truncated for brevity, fields that are of interest is an HTTP “X-header” indicating the transaction utilized the F5 site in Toronto, and the number of tokens consumed in the request and response are also included. Advanced LLM Security Features Many of the AI security concerns are given prominence by the OWASP Top Ten for LLMs, an evolving and curated list of potential concerns around LLM usage from subject matter experts. Among these are prompt injection attacks and malicious instructions often perceived as benign by the LLM. Prompt Security uses a layered approach to thwart prompt injection. For instance, during the uptick in interest in ChatGPT, DAN (Do Anything Now) prompt injection was widespread and a very disruptive force, as discussed here. User prompts will be closely analyzed for the presence of the various DAN templates that have evolved over the past 18 months. More significantly, the use of AI itself allows the Prompt solution to recognize zero-day bespoke prompts attempting to conduct mischief. The interpretative powers of fine-tuned, purpose-built security inspection models are likely the only way to stay one step ahead of bad actors. Another chief concern is protection of the system prompt, the guidelines that reel in unwanted behavior of the offered LLM service, what instructed our LLM earlier in its role as a shoe sales assistant. The system prompt, if somehow manipulated, would be a significant breach in AI security, havoc could be created with an LLM directed astray. As such, Prompt Security offers a policy to compare the user provided prompt, the configured system prompt in the API call, and the response generated by the LLM. In the event that a similarity threshold with the system prompt is exceeded in the other fields, the transaction can be immediately blocked. An interesting advanced safeguard is the support for a “canary” word - a specific value that a well behaved LLM should never present in any response, ever. The detection of the canary word by the Prompt solution will raise an immediate alert. One particularly broad and powerful feature in the AI firewall is the ability to find secrets, meaning tokens or passwords, frequently for cloud-hosted services, that are revealed within user prompts. Prompt Security offers the ability to scour LLM traffic for in excess of 200 meaningful values. Just as a small representative sample of the industry’s breadth of secrets, these can all be detected and acted upon: Azure Storage Keys Detector Artifactory Detector Databricks API tokens GitLab credentials NYTimes Access Tokens Atlassian API Tokens Besides simple blocking, a useful redaction option can be chosen. Rather than risk compromise of credentials and obfuscated value will instead be seen at the LLM. F5 Positive Security Models for AI Endpoints The AI traffic delivered and received from Prompt Security’s AI firewall is both discovered and subjected to API layer policies by the F5 load balancer. Consider the token awareness features of the AI firewall, excessive token consumption can trigger an alert and even transaction blocking. This behavior, a boon when LLMs like the OpenAI premium GPT-4 models may have substantial costs, allows organizations to automatically shut down a malicious actor who illegitimately got hold of an OPENAI_API key value and bombarded the LLM with prompts. This is often referred to as a “Denial of Wallet” situation. F5 Distributed Cloud, with its focus upon the API layer, has congruent safeguards. Each unique user of an API service is tracked to monitor transactional consumption. By setting safeguards for API rate limiting, an excessive load placed upon the API endpoint will result in HTTP 429 “Too Many Request” in response to abusive behavior. A key feature of F5 API Security is the fact that it is actionable in both directions, and also an in-line offering, unlike some API solutions which reside out of band and consume proxy logs for reporting and threat detection. With the automatic discovery of API endpoints, as seen in the following screenshot, the F5 administrator can see the full URL path which in this case exercises the familiar OpenAI /v1/chat/completions endpoint. As highlighted by the arrow, the schema of traffic to API endpoints is fully downloadable as an OpenAPI Specification (OAS), formerly known as a Swagger file. This layer of security means fields in API headers and bodies can be validated for syntax, such that a field whose schema expects a floating-point number can see any different encoding, such as a string, blocked in real-time in either direction. A possible and valuable use case: allow an initial unfettered access to a service such as OpenAI, by means of Prompt Security’s AI firewall service, for a matter of perhaps 48 hours. After a baseline of API endpoints has been observed, the API definition can be loaded from any saved Swagger files at the end of this “observation” period. The loaded version can be fully pruned of undesirable or disallowed endpoints, all future traffic must conform or be dropped. This is an example of a “positive security model”, considered a gold standard by many risk-adverse organizations. Simply put, a positive security model allows what has been agreed upon through and rejects everything else. This ability to learn and review your own traffic, and then only present Prompt Security with LLM endpoints that an organization wants exposed is an interesting example of complementing an AI security solution with rich API layer features. Summary The world of AI and LLMs is rapidly seeing investment, in time and money, from virtually all economic sectors; the promise of rapid dividends in the knowledge economy is hard to resist. As with any rapid deployment of new technology, safe consumption is not guaranteed, and it is not built in. Although LLMs often suggest guardrails are baked into offerings, a 30-second search of the Internet will expose firsthand experiences where unexpected outcomes when invoking AI are real. Brand reputation is at stake and false information can be hallucinated or coerced out of LLMs by determined parties. By combining the ability to ingest globally at high-speed dispersed users and apply a first level of security protections, F5 Distributed Cloud can be leveraged as an onboarding for LLM workloads. As depicted in this article, Prompt Security can in turn handle traffic egressing F5’s distributed HTTPS load balancers and provide state-of-the-art AI safeguards, including sensitive data detection, content moderation and other OWASP-aligned mechanisms like jailbreak and prompt injection mitigation. Other deployment models exist, including deploying Prompt Security’s solution on-premises, self-hosted in cloud tenants, and running the solution on Distributed Cloud CE nodes themselves is supported.Securely Scale RAG - Azure OpenAI Service, F5 Distributed Cloud and NetApp
Arguably, the easiest and most massively scalable approach to harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) is to consume leading services like OpenAI endpoints, the most well-known of cloud-based offering delivered to enterprises over the general Internet. Access to hardware, such as GPUs, and the significant skillset to run LLMs on your own become non-issues, consumption is simply an API call away. One concern, and a serious one, is that sensitive inferencing (AI prompts, both the requests and responses) travels "in the wild" to these LLMs found through DNS at public endpoints. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) adds potentially very sensitive corporate data to prompts, to leverage AI for internal use cases, thus ratcheting up even further the uneasiness with using the general Internet as a conduit to reach LLMs. RAG is a popular method to greatly increase the accuracy and relevancy of generative AI for a company’s unique set of problems. Finally, to leverage sensitive data with RAG, the source documents must be vectorized with similarly remote “embedding” LLMS; once again sensitive, potentially proprietary sensitive data will leave the corporate premises to leverage the large AI solutions like OpenAI or Azure OpenAI. Unlike purveyors of locally executed models, say a repository like Huggingface.com, which allow downloading of binaries to be harnessed on local compute, industry leading solutions like OpenAI and Azure OpenAI Service are founded on the paradigm of remote compute. Beyond the complexity and resources of quickly and correctly setting up performant on-prem models one time, the choice to consume remote endpoints allows hassle-free management like models perpetually updated to latest revisions and full white-glove support available to enterprise customers consuming SaaS AI models. In this article, an approach will be presented where, using F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) and NetApp, Azure OpenAI Service can be leveraged with privacy, where prompts are carried over secured, encrypted tunnels over XC between on-premises enterprise locations and that enterprise’s Azure VNET. The Azure OpenAI models are then exclusively exposed as private endpoints within that VNET, nowhere else in the world. This means both the embedding LLM activity to vectorize sensitive corporate data, and the actual generative AI prompts to harness value from that data are encrypted in flight. All source data and resultant vector databases remain on-premises in well-known solutions like a NetApp ONTAP storage appliance. Why is the Azure OpenAI Service a Practical Enabler of AI Projects? Some of the items that distinguish Azure OpenAI Service include the following: Prompts sent to Azure OpenAI are not forwarded to OpenAI, the service exists within Microsoft Azure, benefiting from the performance of Microsoft’s enormous cloud computing platform Customer prompts are never used for training data to build new or refine existing models Simplified billing, think of the Azure OpenAI Service as analogous to an “all you can eat buffet”, simply harness the AI service and settle the charge incurred on a regular monthly billing cycle With OpenAI, models are exposed at universal endpoints shared by a global audience, added HTTP headers such as the OPENAI_API_KEY value distinguish users and allow billing to occur in accordance with consumption. Azure OpenAI Service is slightly different. No models actually exist to be used until they are setup under an Azure subscription. At this point, beyond receiving an API key to identify the source user, the other major difference is unique API "base" URL (endpoint) is setup for accessing LLMs an organization wishes to use. Examples would be a truly unique enterprise endpoint for GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT4 or perhaps an embedding LLM used in vectorization, such as the popular text-embedding-ada-002 LLM. This second feature of Azure OpenAI Service presents a powerful opportunity to F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) customers. This stems from the fact that unlike traditional OpenAI, this per-organization, unique base URL for API communications does not have to be projected into the global DNS, reachable from anywhere on the Internet. Instead, Microsoft Azure allows the OpenAI service to be constrained to a private endpoint, accessible only from where the customer chooses. Leveraging F5 XC Multicloud Networking offers a way to secure and encrypt communications between on-premises locations and Azure subnets only available from within the organization. What does this add up to for the enterprise with generative AI projects? It means huge scalability for AI services and consuming the very much leading-edge modern OpenAI models, all in a simple manner an enterprise can now consume today with limited technical onus on corporate technology services. The sense of certainty that sensitive data is not cavalierly exposed on the Internet is a critical cog in the wheel of good data governance. Tap Into Secure Data from NetApp ONTAP Clusters for Fortified Access to OpenAI Models The F5 Distributed Cloud global fabric consists of points of presence in 26+ metropolitan markets worldwide, such as Paris, New York, Singapore, that are interconnected with high-speed links aggregating to more than 14 Tbps of bandwidth in total, it is growing quarterly. With the F5 multicloud networking (MCN) solution, customers can easily set up dual-active encrypted tunnels (IPSec or SSL) to two points on the global fabric. The instances connected to are referred to as RE’s (Regional Edge nodes) and the customer-side sites are made up of CE’s (Customer Edge nodes, scalable from one to a full cluster). The service is a SaaS solution and setup is turn-key based upon menu click-ops or Terraform. The customer sites, beyond being in bricks-and-mortar customer data centers and office locations, can also exist within cloud locations such as Microsoft Azure Resource Groups or AWS VPCs, among others. Enterprise customers with existing bandwidth solutions may choose to directly interconnect sites as opposed to leveraging the high-speed F5 global fabric. The net result of an F5 XC Layer 3 multicloud network is high-speed, encrypted communications between customer sites. By disabling the default network access provided by Azure OpenAI Service, and only allowing private endpoint access, one can instantiate a private approach to running workloads with well-known OpenAI models. With this deployment in place, customers may tap into years of data acquired and stored on trusted on-premises NetApp storage appliances to inject value into AI use cases, customized and enhanced inference results using well-regarded, industry-leading OpenAI models. A perennial industry leader in storage is ONTAP from NetApp, a solution that can safely expose volumes to file systems, through protocols such as NFS and SMB/CIFS. The ability to also expose LUNs, meaning block-level data that constitutes remote disks, is also available using protocols like iSCSI. In the preceding diagram, one can leverage AI through a standard Python approach, in the case shown harnessing an Ubuntu Linux server, and volumes provided by ONTAP. AI jobs, rather than calling out to an Internet-routed Azure OpenAI public endpoint can instead interact with a private endpoint, one which resolves through private DNS to an address on a subnet behind a customer Azure CE node. This endpoint cannot be reached from the Internet, it is restricted to only communicating with customer subnets (routes) located in the L3 multicloud deployment. In use cases that leverage one’s own data, a leading approach is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in order to empower Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver niche, hyper-focused responses pertaining to specialized, sometimes proprietary, documents representing the corporate body of knowledge. Simple examples might include highly detailed, potentially confidential, company-specific information distilled from years of financial internal reporting. Another prominent early use case of RAG is to backstop frontline, customer helpdesk employees. With customers sensitive to delays in handling support requests, and pressure to reduce support staff research delays, the OpenAI LLM can harvest only relevant knowledge base (KB) articles, releases notes, and private engineering documents not normally exposed in their entirety. The net result is a much more effective helpdesk experience, with precise, relevant help provided to the support desk employee in seconds. RAG Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI, F5 and NetApp in Nutshell In the sample deployment, one of the more important items to recognize is that two OpenAI models will be harnessed, an embedding LLM and a generative transformer based GPT family LLM. A simple depiction of RAG would be as follows: Using OpenAI Embedding LLMs The OpenAI embedding modeltext-embedding-ada-002 is used first to vectorize data sourced from the on-premises ONTAP system, via NFS volumes mounted to the server hosting Python. The embedding model consumes “chunks” of text from each sourced document and converts the text to numbers, specifically long sequences of numbers, typically in the range of 700 to 1,500 values. These are known as vectors. The vectors returned in the private OpenAI calls are then stored in a vector database, in this case ChromaDB was used. It is important to note, the ChromaDB itself was directed to install itself within a volume supported by the on-premises ONTAP cluster, as such the content at rest is governed by the same security governance as the source content in its native format. Other common industry solutions for vector storage and searches include Milvus and for those looking to cloud-hosted vectors Pinecone. Vector databases are purpose-built to manage vector embeddings. Conventional databases can, in fact, store vectors but the art of doing a semantic search, finding similarities between vectors, would then require vector indices solutions. One of the best known in FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search) which is a library that allows developers to quickly search for embeddings of multimedia documents. These semantic searches would otherwise be inefficient or impossible with standard database engines (SQL). When a prompt is first generated by a client, the text in the prompt is vectorized by the very same OpenAI embedding model, producing a vector on the fly. The key to RAG, the “retriever” function, then compares the newly arrived query with semantically similar text chunks in the database. The actual semantic similarity of the query and previously stored chunks is arrived at through a nearest neighbor search of the vectors, in other words, phrases and sentences that might augment the original prompt can be provided to the OpenAI GPT model. The art of finding semantic similarities relies upon comparing the lengthy vectors. The objective, for instance, to find supportive text around the user query “how to nurture shrub growth” might reasonably align more closely with a previously vectorized paragraph that included “gardening tips for the North American spring of 2024” and less so with vectorized content stemming from a user guide for the departmental photocopy machine. The suspected closeness of vectors, are text samples actually similar topic wise, is a feature of semantic similarity search algorithms, many exist in themarketplace and two approaches commonly leveraged are cosine similarity and Euclidean distance; a brief description for those interested can be found here. The source text chunks corresponding to vectors are retained in the database and it is this source text that augments the prompt after the closest neighbor vectors are calculated. Using OpenAI GPT LLMs Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) refers to a family of LLMs created by OpenAI that are built on atransformer architecture. The specific OpenAI model used in this model is not necessarily the latest, premium model, GPT-4o and GPT-4 Turbo are more recent, however the utilized gpt-35-turbo model is a good intersection of price versus performance and has been used extensively in deployed projects. With the retriever function helping to build an augmented prompt, the default use case documented included three text chunks to buttress the original query. The OpenAI prompt response will not only be infused with the provided content extracted from the customer but unlike normal GPT responses, RAG will have specific attributions to which documents and specific paragraphs led to the response. Brief Overview of Microsoft OpenAI Service Setup Microsoft Azure has a long history of adding innovative new functions as subscribed “opt in” service resources, the Azure OpenAI Service is no different. A thorough, step-by-step guide to setting up the OpenAI service can be found here. This screenshot demonstrates the rich variety of OpenAI models available within Azure, specifically showing the Azure OpenAI Studio interface, highlighting models such as gpt-4, gpt-4o and dall-e-3. In this article, two models are added, one embedding and the other GPT. The following OpenAI Service Resource screen shows the necessary information to actually use our two models. This information consists of the keys (use either KEY1 and KEY2, both can be seen and copied with the Show Keys button) and the unique, per customer endpoint path, frequently referred to as the base URL by OpenAI users. Perhaps the key Azure feature that empowers this article is the ability to disable network access to the configured OpenAI model, as seen below. With traditional network access disabled, we can then enable private endpoint access and set the access point to a network interface on the private subnet connected to the inside interface of our F5 Distributed Cloud CE node. The following re-visits the earlier topology diagram, with focus upon where the Azure OpenAI service interacts with our F5 Distributed Cloud multicloud network. The steps involved in setting up an Azure site in F5 Distributed Cloud are found here. The corresponding steps for configuring an on-premises Distributed Cloud site are found in this location. Many options exist, such as using KVM or a bare metal server, the link provided highlights the VMware ESXi approach to on-premises site creation. Demonstrating RAG in Action using OpenAI Models with a Secure Private Endpoint The RAG setup, in lieu of vectorizing actual private and sensitive documents, utilized the OpenAI embedding LLM to process chunks taken from the classic H.G. Wells 1895 science fiction novel “The Time Machine” in text or markdown format. The novel is one of many in the public domain through the Gutenberg Project. Two NFS folders supported by the NetApp ONTAP appliance in a Redmond, Washington office were used: one for source content and one for supporting the ChromaDB vector database. The NFS mounts are seen below, with the Megabytes consumed and remaining available seen per volume, the ONTAP address can be seen as 10.50.0.220. (Linux Host) #df -h 10.50.0.220:/RAG_Source_Documents_2024 1.9M 511M 1% /mnt/rag_source_files 10.50.0.220:/Vectors 17M 803M 3% /home/sgorman/langchain-rag-tutorial-main/chroma2 The creation of the vector database was handled by one Python script and the actual AI prompts generated against the OpenAI gpt-35-turbo model were housed in another script. This may often make sense, as the vector database creation may be an infrequently run script, only executed when new source content is introduced (/mnt/rag_source_files) whereas the generative AI tasks targeting gpt-3.5-turbo are likely run continuously for imperative business needs like helpdesk or code creations, as example purposes. Creating the vector database first entails preparing the source text, typically remove extraneous formatting or less than valuable text fields, think of boilerplate statements such as repetitive footnotes or perhaps copyright/privacy statements that might be found on every single page of some corporate documents. The next step is to create text chunks for embedding, the tradeoff of using too short chunks will be lack of semantic meaning in any one chunk and a growth in the vector count. Using overly long chunks, on the other hand, could lead to lengthy augmented prompts sent to gpt-35-turbo that significantly grow the token count for requests, although many models now support very large token counts a common value remains a total, for requests and responses, of 4,096 tokens. Token counts are the foundation for most billing formulae of endpoint-based AI models. Finally, it is important to have some degree of overlap of generated chunks such that meanings and themes within documents are not lost; if an idea is fragmented at the demarcation point of adjacent chunks the model may not pickup on its importance. The vectorization script for “The Time Machine” resulted in 978 chunks being created from the source text, with character counts per chunk not to exceed 300 characters. The text splitting function is loaded from LangChain and the pertinent code lines include: from langchain.text_splitter import RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter text_splitter = RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter( chunk_size=300, chunk_overlap=100, } The values of 100 characters of overlaps suggests each chunk will incorporate 200 characters of new text within the total of 300 grabbed. It is important to remember all characters, even white space, count towards totals. As per the following screenshot, the source novel, when split into increments of 200 new characters per chunk does indicate 978 chunks were indeed a correct total (double click to expand). With the source data vectorized and secure on the NetApp appliance, the actual use of the gpt-35-turbo OpenAI model could commence. The following shows an example, where the model is instructed in the system prompt to only respond via information it can glean from the RAG augmented prompt text, the response portions shown in red font. python3 create99.py “What is the palace of green porcelain?” <response highlights below, the response also included the full text chunks RAG suggested would potentially support the LLM in answering the posed question> Answer the question based on the above context: What is the palace of green porcelain? Response: content='The Palace of Green Porcelain is a deserted and ruined structure with remaining glass fragments in its windows and corroded metallic framework.' response_metadata={'token_usage': {'completion_tokens': 25, 'prompt_tokens': 175, 'total_tokens': 200}, 'model_name': 'gpt-35-turbo', The response of gpt-35-turbo is correct, and we see that the token consumption is heavily slanted towards the request (the “prompt”), with 175 tokens used whereas the response required only 25 tokens. The key takeaways are that the prompt and its response did not travel hop-by-hop over the Internet to a public endpoint, all traffic traveled with VPN-like security from the on-premises server and ONTAP to a private Azure subnet using F5 Distributed Cloud. The OpenAI model was utilized as a private endpoint, corresponding a network interface available only on that private subnet and not found within the global DNS, only the private corporate DNS or /etc/hosts files. Adding Laser Precision to RAG Using the default chunking strategy did lead to sub-optimal results, when ideas, themes and events were lost across chunk boundaries, even when including some degree of overlap. The following is one example: A key moment in the H.G. Wells book involves the protagonist meeting a character Weena, who provides strange white flowers which are pocketed. Upon returning to the present time, the time traveler relies upon the exotic and foreign look of the white flowers to attempt to prove to friends the veracity of his tale. # python3 query99.py “What did Weena give the Time Traveler?” As captured in the response below, the chunks provided by RAG do not provide all the details, only that something of note was pocketed, but gpt-35-turbo can therefore not return a sufficient answer as the full details are not provided in the augmented prompt. The screenshot shows first the three chunks and at the end the best answer the LLM could provide (double click to expand). The takeaway is that some effort will be required to adjust the vectorization process to pick optimally large chunk sizes, and sufficient numbers to properly empower the OpenAI model. In this demonstration, based upon vectors and their corresponding text, only three text chunks were harnessed to augment the user prompt. By increasing this number to 5 or 10, and increasing each of the chunk sizes, all of course at the expense of token consumption, one would expect more accurate results from the LLM. Summary This article demonstrated a more secure approach to using OpenAI models as a programmatic endpoint service in which proprietary company information can be kept secure by not using the general purpose, insecure Internet to provide prompts for vectorization and general AI inquiries. Instead, an approach was followed where the Azure OpenAI service was deployed as a private endpoint, exclusively available at an address on a private subnet within an enterprise’s Azure subscription, a subnet with no external access. By utilizing F5 Distributed Cloud Multicloud Networking, existing corporate locations and data centers can be connected to that enterprise’s Azure resource groups and private, encrypted communications can take place between these networks, the necessary routing and tunneling technologies are deployed in a turn-key manner without requiring advanced network skillsets. When leveraging NetApp ONTAP as the continued enterprise storage solution, RAG deployments based upon Azure OpenAI service can continue to be managed and secured with well-developed storage administration skills. In this example, ONTAP housed both the source, sensitive enterprise content and the actual vector database resulting from interactions with the Azure OpenAI embedding LLM. Subsequent to a discussion on vectors and optimal chunking strategies, RAG was utilized to answer questions on private documents using the well-known OpenAI chat-35-turbo model.Secure, Deliver and Optimize Your Modern Generative AI Apps with F5
In this demo, Foo-Bang Chan explores how F5's solutions can help you implement, secure, and optimize your chatbots and other AI applications. This will ensure they perform at their best while protecting sensitive data. One of the AI frameworks showed is Enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This demo leverages F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) AppStack, Distributed Cloud WAAP, NGINX Plus as API Gateway, API-Discovery, API-Protection, LangChain, Vector databases, and Flowise AI.Global Live Webinar(07/25): The AI Tsunami: Is Your API Security Ready for the Perfect Storm?
The AI Tsunami: Is Your API Security Ready for the Perfect Storm? Date: July 25, 2024 Time: 10:00am PT | 1:00pm ET What's the webinar about? The rise of AI is not all hype and frenzy. There are real implications—for productivity and competitiveness, and for governance and compliance. Every organization will have to evaluate how AI apps impact their business. We’ve already reached an untenable state of risk and complexity with the rapid evolution of apps into API-based systems. Adding AI into the mix is like pouring gasoline on an already burning ball of fire. Multi-model and multimodal LLMs along with expanding AI ecosystems drive multicloud architectures—and they’re all connected by APIs. It is imperative that architects and security teams unpack the massive risk surface for AI apps— and see why AI must be embraced by defenders to tango with adversarial AI that has democratized and supersized attacker arsenals. In this webinar, we’ll cover: Explore the fundamentals of AI such as Large Language Models, training, and inference. Show the importance of secure multicloud networking and API security for delivering, protecting, and optimizing AI-enhanced digital experiences. Highlight how F5 API security solutions are AI-ready and can help you safely unleash innovation. To register, click hereProtect multi-cloud and Edge Generative AI applications with F5 Distributed Cloud
F5 Distributed Cloud capabilities allows customers to use a single platform for connectivity, application delivery and security of GenAI applications in any cloud location and at the Edge, with a consistent and simplified operational model, a game changer for streamlined operational experience for DevOps, NetOps and SecOps.
