Managed Identities

Managed identities eliminate the need to store credentials in code, configuration files, or key vaults when Azure resources need to authenticate to other Azure services. They provide an automatically managed identity in Entra ID that your code can use to obtain access tokens without handling secrets.

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The Problem Managed Identities Solve

Consider a web application hosted in Azure App Service that needs to read data from Azure SQL Database. Without managed identities, you would need to:

1. Create a service account or application registration
2. Generate a client secret or certificate
3. Store the secret in your application configuration or a key vault
4. Rotate the secret before it expires
5. Handle secret leaks if the configuration is compromised

This creates operational overhead and security risk. Managed identities remove all of these steps.

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How Managed Identities Work