Connecting services has never been so easy with Service Connector – now Generally Available

Microsoft

May 24, 2022

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Service Connector on Azure App Service and Azure Spring Apps. You can seamlessly connect your Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps and Azure Container Apps (in preview) to database, storage, real-time messaging services with single-click or single-command experience in Service Connector. You also get the connection health status for different aspects of each connection.

Service Connector abstracts away the complexity of service wiring and connection management, so you can focus on building your business logic and let Azure take care of the configurations between services.

Over the past two years, we worked with many customers to learn how they run cloud native apps on Azure. Many of these apps use services such as App Service and talk to Azure database services, storage accounts, Azure messaging services, Key Vault, etc. After these services get provisioned, customers have to figure out how to wire them up. In addition, they must ensure they are connected to each other in a secure way, which involves identity/authentication configuration, firewall/VNET configuration and secret store configuration. Service Connector streamlines this journey, providing a unified experience to easily connect these cloud services.

Create service connections in one-click/one command

Service Connector makes it intuitive and seamless to connect your compute service to other target services. Once your compute service is provisioned, you can make the connection in one-click or one-command by using Azure Portal or CLI commands.

Figure 1: Using Service Connector to connect App Service and Azure SQL Database

Store secrets into Key Vault

With Service Connector’s built-in Key Vault integration, storing secrets into your Key Vault is as simple as clicking a button – making your connection truly secure.

Figure 2: Store access keys and secrets into your Key Vault during service connection creation.

Consistent experience across compute platform

Service Connector offers unified experience across the major compute services on Azure. No matter where you host your app on Azure, you can find the same portal entry point, CLI commands and Terraform support.

Figure 3: Unified command line interface to create service connections.

Monitor connection status and troubleshoot connection issues

After connecting services together with either firewall rules or via VNet, you can use corresponding environment variables and secrets to interact with the target services with data plane SDKs. Often, the connection can be broken due to cloud environment drift. You can go back to your connection list and validate your connection health status. Service Connect checks all the nodes in your connection and helps troubleshoot connection issues.

Figure 4: Connection health validation.

Build your own apps with Azure services and connect them with Service Connector today

With one click or one command, you can create a connection and start using it in your cloud application in a secure way and start monitoring the connection status. We’d love to hear you how you are using Service Connector in your apps.