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
Related
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.
We have a release pipeline that is failing with following message:
resource ID for resource type 'Microsoft.Web/Sites' and resource name
'appservicename'. Error: Could not fetch access token for Managed
Service Principal. Please configure Managed Service Identity (MSI) for
virtual machine 'https://aka.ms/azure-msi-docs'. Status code: 400,
status message: Bad Request
We have 2 different service connections:
Azure Resource Manager using service principal authentication
Azure Resource Manager using managed identity authentication
The first one works like a charm. However, because the developer wanted to limit admin access on the Azure AD, he tried creating a managed identity authentication service connection which at first glance, since it allowed us to select the App Service, appeared to indicate it's working, until an actual deployment was triggered and it failed per the error message above.
After numerous searches online, I think this answer may be the clue to why this is failing with the managed identity authentication service connection yet succeeding with the service principal connection just fine.
I just want to confirm, is this truly the case? that a hosted agent doesn't support MSI based authentication, which is what we are using… or has that changed?
We are indeed using Microsoft agent pool.
It doesn't make sense for our app service to use a VM at this time. The use case just isn't applicable for the dashboards we have.
As it is written in the docs:
You are required to use a self-hosted agent on an Azure VM in order to use managed service identity
I assume that it was alway like that. Here we are talking abut MSI assigned to VM which serves as build agent. Not MSI which is identity of App Service. Why? Service Connection is an abstraction which makes easy authentication to your Azure Subscription. So it gives identity to VM and then when your perform some action against your Azure thanks to MSI Azure know that can perform that action. Another aption is authentication via Service Principal, but thi can be done from any VM (inlcuding MS Hosted) because it relies on Client Id and Client secret which is kept in service connections. And MSI have to be assigned to particular VM which cannot be done with MS Hosted agents.
I am using deployment group to deploy a .NET Core Console app to an on prem VM. In order to register the target I run the PAT on the VM. Is there a way I can use a Service Account to generate the PAT and use that to register the VM instead of my personal account?
I have used this article as a guide.
https://medium.com/#samjwright/automating-deployments-to-on-premis-servers-with-azure-devops-bb0e6cac4656
Is there a way I can use a Service Account to generate the PAT and use
that to register the VM instead of my personal account?
If you can use the service account to log in, then you can also create PAT with proper scopes in the user settings of the service account. You can refer to this ticket.
In addition, PAT is only used during registration of agent. The identity of agent pool administrator is needed ONLY at the time of registration and is not persisted on the agent, nor is used in any further communication between the agent and Azure Pipelines or TFS. Once the registration is complete, the agent downloads a listener OAuth token and uses it to listen to the job queue.
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.
I am trying to use Docker images from an Azure Container Registry as tasks in Azure Batch. In the Docker CLI, I can authenticate to the ACR using an Active Directory Service Principal's credentials, with the application ID as the username and the key as the password, as per the ACR documentation.
When I attempt to use the web portal to manually enter those credentials in the a new pool VM container registry settings, I receive the following error on submission:
The value provided for one of the properties in the request body is invalid.
The maximum length of user name that can be specified on a containerRegistry is 20
If I use the AzureRm.Batch Powershell module cmdlets, the pool is created however the containerRegistry and containerImages properties are null.
Can this AD SP authentication method be used with Azure Batch VM container registration configuration? Do I need to use a specific SDK to accomplish this?
This was fixed on March 16th, 2018.