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Managing Secrets and Secure Access in Azure Applications

Example of managing the secrets and permissions via services and features like KeyVault, AD Managed Identity, AD RBAC

This example lives in the pulumi/examples repository. Check out just this directory to use it:

Get started with this example
git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/pulumi/examples pulumi-examples
git -C pulumi-examples sparse-checkout set classic-azure-cs-msi-keyvault-rbac
cd pulumi-examples/classic-azure-cs-msi-keyvault-rbac

Managed identities for Azure resources provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

This example demonstrates using a managed identity with Azure App Service to access Azure KeyVault, Azure Storage, and Azure SQL Database without passwords or secrets.

The application consists of several parts:

  • An ASP.NET Application which reads data from a SQL Database and from a file in Blob Storage
  • App Service which host the application. The application binaries are placed in Blob Storage, with Blob Url placed as a secret in Azure Key Vault
  • App Service has a Managed Identity enabled
  • The identify is granted access to the SQL Server, Blob Storage, and Key Vault
  • No secret information is placed in App Service configuration: all access rights are derived from Active Directory

Deploying the App#

To deploy your infrastructure, follow the below steps.

Prerequisites#

  1. Install Pulumi
  2. Install .NET Core 3.0+

Steps#

  1. Create a new stack:

    Terminal window
    pulumi stack init dev
  2. Login to Azure CLI (you will be prompted to do this during deployment if you forget this step):

    Terminal window
    az login
  3. Build and publish the ASP.NET Core project:

    Terminal window
    dotnet publish webapp
  4. Set an appropriate Azure location like:

    Terminal window
    pulumi config set azure:location westus
    pulumi config set azure:subscriptionId <YOUR_SUBSCRIPTION_ID>
  5. Run pulumi up to preview and deploy changes:

    Terminal window
    pulumi up
    Previewing changes:
    ...
    Performing changes:
    ...
    info: 15 changes performed:
    + 15 resources created
    Update duration: 4m16s
  6. Check the deployed website endpoint:

    Terminal window
    pulumi stack output Endpoint
    https://app129968b8.azurewebsites.net/
    curl "$(pulumi stack output Endpoint)"
    Hello 311378b3-16b7-4889-a8d7-2eb77478beba@50f73f6a-e8e3-46b6-969c-bf026712a650! Here is your...
  7. From there, feel free to experiment. Simply making edits and running pulumi up will incrementally update your stack.

  8. Once you’ve finished experimenting, tear down your stack’s resources by destroying and removing it:

    Terminal window
    pulumi destroy --yes
    pulumi stack rm --yes

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