I see that Service Connection is a link between Azure Pipelines and Azure Subscription to trigger Pipelines.
But can I create a Service Connection and get client id and secret and use that to obtain access token. And with that access token I can run the Azure Pipeline via c# code with REST APIs?
Is this what a service connection used for ?
But can I create a Service Connection and get client id and secret and
use that to obtain access token.
You can generate token via this, but you can't use it in C# code to run the pipeline.
Service connection between 'Azure Pipelines and Azure Subscription' just for you to create an app in AAD, this will also create related Enterprise App(service principal) in Azure portal side.
The service principal can be assigned permissions in the Azure portal to access resources. Once the service principal has access to a resource at the Azure Portal, the devops pipeline using the service connection associated with the service principal will also have the same access.
The original purpose of the above is service connection design is to allow the pipeline to have access to the resources at the portal.
Why we can't use the app's clientid and secret to get an access token to run the pipeline?
It is clearly in this official document:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/integrate/get-started/authentication/authentication-guidance?view=azure-devops
The Azure DevOps API doesn't support non-interactive service access
via service principals.
Related
i am implementing CI/CD pipeline that needs to register an AAD Application with permissions to read/write into Site collections, this would mean that the pipeline itself need to have permission to 'Sites.FullControl.All'. I want to understand from the security perspective, if this is desirable, i.e., a pipeline having FullControl access to a SharePoint tenant. What are the recommended practices w.r.t. this, will the application registration in such scenarios be manually done by Ops team?
According to your description, it seems that you want to use the service connection in the Azure CI/CD pipeline.
We can create a service connection with Service principal (automatic) or Service principal (manual).
Use the following parameters to define and secure a connection to a Microsoft Azure subscription using Service Principal Authentication (SPA) or an Azure managed Service Identity.
Automated subscription detection. In this mode, Azure Pipelines
queries Azure for all of the subscriptions and instances to which you
have access. They use the credentials you're currently signed in with
in Azure Pipelines (including Microsoft accounts and School or Work
accounts).
If you don't see the subscription you want to use, sign out of Azure Pipelines and sign in again using the appropriate account credentials.
Manual subscription pipeline. In this mode, you must specify the
service principal you want to use to connect to Azure. The service
principal specifies the resources and the access levels that are
available over the connection.
For more information, you could refer to Azure Resource Manager service connection.
I'm trying to create a release pipeline in Azure DevOps. I created an App service resource in Azure and I want to deploy my web-app to this App service through my pipeline. For that I need to create an ARM service connection. Can you please help me with understanding the difference between the types of service connections? Thanks!
What is the difference between Service Principal (automatic) and Service Principal (manual) ?
What is the difference between service principal, managed identity and publish profile?
What is the difference between Service Principal (automatic) and Service Principal (manual) ?
Service Principal (automatic): It will create an AD App along with the service principal in Azure AD for you automatically and use it in the service connection.
Service Principal (manual): You need to create the AD App along with the service principal manually in Azure AD and configure it when you create the service connection.
What is the difference between service principal, managed identity and publish profile?
When you create an AD App(App Registration) in Azure AD, it will create a service principal for you automatically in your Azure AD.
The managed identity is essentially a service principal in your AAD managed by Azure, you can use it to access azure resources in the subscription.
The publish profile is a file used to publish your web app or web job, it includes a username and password, it uses the basic auth to deploy your web app, if you use service principal/managed identity, it uses Azure AD auth.
I'm developing an extension that runs within a work item.
Is there a way I can acquire an AAD token for the current logged in user, which can be used to authenticate to an AAD protected backend service like Azure App Service/Key Vault etc?
I'm afraid you can't do that directly. Azure Devops Service and Azure are not the same things.
We can use VSS SDK and azure-devops-extension-api to get Azure-devops related info(AccessToken for Azure Devops Service,Org info, Project info, User info), but we can't get AAD token using these related api cause these apis are for Azure Devops Service.
Will kubernetes service connections in azure devops work with an AKS cluster that is bound to AAD via openidconnect? Logging into such clusters goes through an openidconnect flow that involves a device login + browser. How is this possible w/ azure devops k8s service connections?
Will kubernetes service connections in azure devops work with an AKS
cluster that is bound to AAD via openidconnect?
Unfortunately to say, no, this does not support until now.
According to your description, what you want to connect with in Azure Devops Kubernetes service connection is Azure Kubernetes service. This means you would select Azure Subscription in Choose authentication. BUT, this connection method is using Service Principal Authentication (SPA) to authenticate, which does not yet supported for the AKS that is bound with AAD auth.
If you connect your AKS cluster as part of your CI/CD deployment in Azure Devops, and attempt to get the cluster credentials. You would get a warning response which inform you to log in since the service principal cannot handle it:
WARNING: To sign in, use a web browser to open the page https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the code *** to authenticate.
You should familiar with this message, it needs you open a browser to login in to complete the device code authentication manually. But this could not be achieve in Azure Devops.
There has a such feature request raised on our forum which request us expand this feature to Support non-interactive login for AAD-integrated clusters. You can vote and comment there to advance the priority of this suggestion ticket. Then it could be considered into the develop plan by our Product Manager as soon as possible.
Though it could not be achieved directly. But there has 2 work around can for you refer now.
The first work around is change the Azure DevOps authenticate itself from AAD client to the server client.
Use az aks get-credentials command and specify the parameter --admin with it. This can help with bypassing the Azure AD auth since it can let you connect and retrieve the admin credentials which can work without Azure AD.
But, I do not recommend this method because subjectively, this method is ignoring the authentication rules set in AAD for security. If you want a quick method to achieve what you want and not too worry about the security, you can try with this.
The second one is using Kubernetes service accounts
You can follow this doc to create a service account. Then in Azure Devops, we could use this service account to communicate with AKS API. Here you also need to consider about the authorized IP address ranges in AKS.
After the service account created successfully, choose Service account in the service connection of Azure Devops:
Server URL: Get it from the AKS instance(API server address) in Azure portal, then do not forget append the https:// before it while you input it into this service connection.
Secret: Generate it by using command:
kubectl get secret -n <name of secret> -o yaml -n service-accounts
See this doc: Deploy Vault on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Then you can use this service connection in Azure Devops tasks.
In the Azure DevOps portal I created a Service connection for Azure RM. It works correctly. Now I want to get client Id and client secret in release step (by using PowerShell) when I'm authenticated with this Service connection. Is it possible?
You can use the Get-AzureAdApplicationPasswordCredential cmdlet to get the password credential for an application.
Here is the offical documentation. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/azuread/get-azureadapplicationpasswordcredential?view=azureadps-2.0