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Day 4 - Creating a Service Principal in Azure in plain English (Linux Edition)

When using Azure, there are several reasons why you may be required to create a Service Principal. Such as

  • Kubernetes
  • Ansible
  • Custom Applications

While Microsoft's Official Documentation tells you everything you need to know, we wanted to provide you with a quick and safe way to create a new Service Principal without using the Azure Portal and in a way that can be programmatically integrated into your existing IaC automation. Follow the directions below to create a Service Principal in Azure using the Azure CLI.

Note: This article was tested on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS

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Create the Service Principal

Use the Azure CLI to create a new Service Principal in the target Azure Subscription.

AZURE_SP=$(/usr/bin/az ad sp create-for-rbac \
--role "contributor" \
--name "iac-sp" \
--years 3)

Note: When you don't supply a value for --role, then the Service Principal will be granted contributor rights across the entire Subscription. Additionally,the credentials are valid for 1 year by default

You should see the following output.

Changing "iac-sp" to a valid URI of "http://iac-sp", which is the required format used for service principal names
Creating a role assignment under the scope of "/subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
  Retrying role assignment creation: 1/36
  Retrying role assignment creation: 2/36
  Retrying role assignment creation: 3/36

Retrieve and Store the Service Principal Password

The Password that was automatically generated by Azure for the Service Principal is retrievable from the $AZURE_SP variable.

You can echo it out using the following command.

echo $AZURE_SP | jq .password | tr -d '"'

You can use the following syntax below to store the Password in a variable and then add it to an existing Azure Key Vault.

IAC_SP_PASSWORD=$(echo $AZURE_SP | jq .password | tr -d '"')

/usr/bin/az keyvault secret set \
--name "iac-sp-password" \
--vault-name "myiacvault" \
--value "$IAC_SP_PASSWORD" \
--output none