A common challenge in cloud development is managing the credentials used to authenticate to cloud services. Today, I am happy to announce the Azure Active Directory Managed Service Identity (MSI) preview. MSI gives your code an automatically managed identity for authenticating to Azure services, so that you can keep credentials out of your code.
Your code needs credentials to authenticate to cloud services, but you want to limit the visibility of those credentials as much as possible. Ideally, they never appear on a developer’s workstation or get checked-in to source control. Azure Key Vault can store credentials securely so they aren’t in your code, but to retrieve them you need to authenticate to Azure Key Vault. To authenticate to Key Vault, you need a credential! A classic bootstrap problem. Through the magic of Azure and Azure AD, MSI provides a “bootstrap identity” that makes it much simpler to get things started.
Read about it in the Azure blog.