Access Azure Key Vault from Azure Cosmos DB using a managed identity
APPLIES TO: NoSQL MongoDB Cassandra Gremlin Table
Azure Cosmos DB may need to read secret/key data from Azure Key Vault. For example, your Azure Cosmos DB may require a customer-managed key stored in Azure Key Vault. To do this, Azure Cosmos DB should be configured with a managed identity, and then an Azure Key Vault access policy should grant the managed identity access.
Prerequisites
- An Azure account with an active subscription. Create an account for free.
- An existing Azure Cosmos DB API for NoSQL account. Create an Azure Cosmos DB API for NoSQL account
- An existing Azure Key Vault resource. Create a key vault using the Azure CLI
- To perform the steps in this article, install the Azure CLI and sign in to Azure.
Prerequisite check
In a terminal or command window, store the names of your Azure Key Vault resource, Azure Cosmos DB account and resource group as shell variables named
keyVaultName
,cosmosName
, andresourceGroupName
.# Variable for function app name keyVaultName="msdocs-keyvault" # Variable for Azure Cosmos DB account name cosmosName="msdocs-cosmos-app" # Variable for resource group name resourceGroupName="msdocs-cosmos-keyvault-identity"
Note
These variables will be re-used in later steps. This example assumes your Azure Cosmos DB account name is
msdocs-cosmos-app
, your key vault name ismsdocs-keyvault
and your resource group name ismsdocs-cosmos-keyvault-identity
.
Create a system-assigned managed identity in Azure Cosmos DB
First, create a system-assigned managed identity for the existing Azure Cosmos DB account.
Important
This how-to guide assumes that you are using a system-assigned managed identity. Many of the steps are similar when using a user-assigned managed identity.
Run
az cosmosdb identity assign
to create a new system-assigned managed identity.az cosmosdb identity assign \ --resource-group $resourceGroupName \ --name $cosmosName
Retrieve the metadata of the system-assigned managed identity using
az cosmosdb identity show
, filter to just return theprincipalId
property using the query parameter, and store the result in a shell variable namedprincipal
.principal=$( az cosmosdb identity show \ --resource-group $resourceGroupName \ --name $cosmosName \ --query principalId \ --output tsv ) echo $principal
Note
This variable will be re-used in a later step.
Create an Azure Key Vault access policy
In this step, create an access policy in Azure Key Vault using the previously managed identity.
Use the
az keyvault set-policy
command to create an access policy in Azure Key Vault that gives the Azure Cosmos DB managed identity permission to access Key Vault. Specifically, the policy will use the key-permissions parameters to grant permissions toget
,list
, andimport
keys.az keyvault set-policy \ --name $keyVaultName \ --object-id $principal \ --key-permissions get list import
Next steps
- To use customer-managed keys in Azure Key Vault with your Azure Cosmos DB account, see configure customer-managed keys
- To use Azure Key Vault to manage secrets, see secure credentials.