Azure service principals and Entra
I was trying to create an OpenShift cluster on Azure and kept running into this concept of a Service Principal. Let's take a look.
First of all, when you create a new ARO (Azure RedHat OpenShift) cluster deployment, a service principal is automatically created.
To interact with Azure APIs, a Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster requires a Microsoft Entra service principal. This service principal is used to dynamically create, manage, or access other Azure resources, such as an Azure load balancer or an Azure Container Registry.
What is Microsoft Entra?
- A central system for managing users, devices, and other principals to secure access to organizational resources.
- It's beyond Azure. It's a Microsoft thing. It can guard access to Office360 and other Microsoft products and services.
- There are users, groups, sign-in logs, audit logs,
- Entra ID is the identity provider for a lot of the Microsoft SaaS products
Back to service principals...
What are Service Principals?
- An identity used by applications and services
- Appropriately used for automated scenarios (machines, not people)
- Behind the scenes, it's a username and password
- Essentially, it's a service account
When you create an "app" you create a service principal
When you create a service principal you create an "app"
confusing.