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nicksal
Copper Contributor
Apr 20, 2026

Azure RBAC Custom Role Best Practices or Common Build Patterns

As a platform admin, I want to grant application admins Contributor access while removing their ability to write or delete most Microsoft.Network resource types, with a few exceptions such as Private Endpoints, Network Interfaces, and Application Gateways.

Based on the effective control plane permissions logic, we designed two custom roles. The first role is a duplicate of the Contributor role, but with Microsoft.Network//Write and Microsoft.Network//Delete added to notActions. The second role adds back specific Microsoft.Network operations using wildcarded resource types, such as Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces/*.

Application Admin Effective Permissions = Role 1 (Contributor - Microsoft.Network) + Role 2 (for example, Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces/, Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/, Microsoft.Network/applicationGateways/write, etc.)

I understand that Microsoft RBAC best practices recommend avoiding wildcard (*) operations. However, my team has found that building roles with individual operations is extremely tedious and time-consuming, especially when trying to understand the impact of each operation.

Does anyone have suggestions for a simpler or more maintainable pattern for implementing this type of custom RBAC design?

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