Authenticate your Azure deployment pipeline by using service principals
Service principals enable your deployment pipelines to authenticate securely with Azure. In this module, you'll learn what service principals are, how they work, and how to create them. You'll also learn how to grant them permission to your Azure resources so that your pipelines can deploy your Bicep files.
Learning objectives
After completing this module, you'll be able to:
- Explain what a service principal is, how it works, and how it compares to a managed identity
- Create a service principal and manage its keys
- Configure the appropriate authorization for a service principal to deploy Azure resources
Prerequisites
You should be familiar with:
- Creating and deploying basic Bicep templates.
- Azure, including the Azure portal, subscriptions, resource groups, and resource definitions.
To follow along with the exercises in the module, you'll need:
- An Azure account, with the ability to create resource groups and to create Microsoft Entra applications and service principals.
- Visual Studio Code, installed locally.
- The Bicep extension for Visual Studio Code, installed locally.
- Either:
- The latest Azure CLI tools, installed locally.
- The latest version of Azure PowerShell, installed locally.