AI Central

AI Central gives you control over your AI services.

• Prompt and usage logging to Azure Monitor
  • Works for streaming endpoints as-well as non streaming
• Enhanced Open Telemetry metrics
  • Build insightful dashboards using your monitoring tool of choice
• Intelligent Routing
  • Random endpoint selector
  • Prioritised endpoint selector with fallback
  • Lowest Latency endpoint selector
• Can proxy asynchronous requests such as Azure Open AI Image Generation across fleets of servers
• Custom consumer OAuth2 authorisation
• Circuit breakers, and backoff-retry over downstream AI services
• Local token rate limiting
  • By consumer / by endpoint
  • By number of tokens (including streaming by estimated token count)
• Local request rate limiting
  • By consumer / by endpoint
• Bulkhead support for buffering requests to backend

Extensibility model makes it easy to build your own plugins

Configuration

See Configuration for more details.

The Azure Open AI SDK retries by default. As AI Central does this for you you can turn it off in the client by passing new Azure.AI.OpenAI.OpenAIClientOptions() { RetryPolicy = null } when you create an OpenAIClient

Minimal

This sample produces a AI-Central proxy that

• Listens on a hostname of your choosing
• Proxies directly through to a back-end Open AI server
• Can be accessed using standard SDKs

Installation

Docker

# Run container in Docker, referencing a local configuration file
docker run -p 8080:8080 -v .\appsettings.Development.json:/app/appsettings.Development.json -e ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development graemefoster/aicentral:latest

Asp.Net CORE

#Create new project and bootstrap the AICentral nuget package
dotnet new web -o MyAICentral
cd MyAICentral
dotnet add package AICentral
#dotnet add package AICentral.Logging.AzureMonitor

Program.cs

//Minimal API to configure AI Central
var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddAICentral(builder.Configuration);

app.UseAICentral(
    builder.Configuration,
    //if using logging extension
    additionalComponentAssemblies: [ typeof(AzureMonitorLoggerFactory).Assembly ]
);

var app = builder.Build();

app.Run();

appsettings.<environment>.json

{
  "AICentral": {
    "Endpoints": [
      {
        "Type": "AzureOpenAIEndpoint",
        "Name": "openai-1",
        "Properties": {
          "LanguageEndpoint": "https://<my-ai>.openai.azure.com",
          "AuthenticationType": "Entra"
        }
      }
    ],
    "AuthProviders": [
      {
        "Type": "Entra",
        "Name": "aad-role-auth",
        "Properties": {
          "Entra": {
            "ClientId": "<my-client-id>",
            "TenantId": "<my-tenant-id>",
            "Instance": "https://login.microsoftonline.com/"
          },
          "Requirements" : {
            "Roles": ["required-roles"]
          }
        }
      }
    ],
    "EndpointSelectors": [
      {
        "Type": "SingleEndpoint",
        "Name": "default",
        "Properties": {
          "Endpoint": "openai-1"
        }
      }
    ],
    "Pipelines": [
      {
        "Name": "AzureOpenAIPipeline",
        "Host": "mypipeline.mydomain.com",
        "AuthProvider": "aad-role-auth",
        "EndpointSelector": "default"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Enriched telemetry and logging

Out of the box AI Central emits Open Telemetry metrics with the following dimensions:

• Consumer
• Endpoint
• Pipeline
• Prompt Tokens
• Response Tokens including streaming

Allowing insightful dashboards to be built using your monitoring tool of choice.

AI Central also allows fine-grained logging. We ship an extension that logs to Azure Monitor, but it's easy to build your own.

See advanced-otel for dashboard inspiration!

Full example

This pipeline will:

• Present an Azure Open AI, and an Open AI downstream as a single upstream endpoint
  • maps incoming Azure Open AI deployments to Open AI models
• Present it as an Azure Open AI style endpoint
• Protect the front-end by requiring an AAD token issued for your own AAD application
• Put a local Asp.Net core rate-limiting policy over the endpoint
• Add logging to Azure monitor
  • Logs quota, client caller information, and in this case the Prompt but not the response.

{
  "AICentral": {
    "Endpoints": [
      {
        "Type": "AzureOpenAIEndpoint",
        "Name": "openai-priority",
        "Properties": {
          "LanguageEndpoint": "https://<my-ai>.openai.azure.com",
          "AuthenticationType": "Entra|EntraPassThrough|ApiKey"
        }
      },
      {
        "Type": "OpenAIEndpoint",
        "Name": "openai-fallback",
        "Properties": {
          "LanguageEndpoint": "https://api.openai.com",
          "ModelMappings": {
            "Gpt35Turbo0613": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
            "Ada002Embedding": "text-embedding-ada-002"
          },
          "ApiKey": "<my-api-key>",
          "Organization": "<optional-organisation>"
        }
      }
    ],
    "AuthProviders": [
      {
        "Type": "Entra",
        "Name": "simple-aad",
        "Properties": {
          "Entra": {
            "ClientId": "<my-client-id>",
            "TenantId": "<my-tenant-id>",
            "Instance": "https://login.microsoftonline.com/",
            "Audience": "<custom-audience>"
          },
          "Requirements" : {
            "Roles": ["required-roles"]
          }
        }
      }
    ],
    "EndpointSelectors": [
      {
        "Type": "Prioritised",
        "Name": "my-endpoint-selector",
        "Properties": {
          "PriorityEndpoints": ["openai-1"],
          "FallbackEndpoints": ["openai-fallback"]
        }
      }
    ],
    "GenericSteps": [
      {
        "Type": "AspNetCoreFixedWindowRateLimiting",
        "Name": "window-rate-limiter",
        "Properties": {
          "LimitType": "PerConsumer|PerAICentralEndpoint",
          "MetricType": "Requests",
          "Options": {
            "Window": "00:00:10",
            "PermitLimit": 100
          }
        }
      },
      {
        "Type": "AzureMonitorLogger",
        "Name": "azure-monitor-logger",
        "Properties": {
          "WorkspaceId": "<workspace-id>",
          "Key": "<key>",
          "LogPrompt": true,
          "LogResponse": false,
          "LogClient": true
        }
      }
    ],
    "Pipelines": [
      {
        "Name": "MyPipeline",
        "Host": "prioritypipeline.mydomain.com",
        "EndpointSelector": "my-endpoint-selector",
        "AuthProvider": "simple-aad",
        "Steps": [
          "window-rate-limiter",
          "azure-monitor-logger"
        ],
        "OpenTelemetryConfig": {
          "AddClientNameTag": true,
          "Transmit": true
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}