by Arlan Nugara | Sep 28, 2018 | Azure, PowerShell
An Azure service principal is a security identity used by applications, services, and automation tools to access designated Azure resources. The service principal is a ‘user identity’ (username and password) with an assigned role/permissions in Azure Active Directory (AAD). The service principal should only need to do specific things, unlike a general user identity. In this example, a new Service Principal will be created in AAD and assigned to an Azure Resource Group. Read here for the steps to register a new Service Principal using the Azure ARM Portal
Using PowerShell
1. #Login to Azure Subscription
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Connect-AzureRmAccount -Subscription <Your Subscription Name> |
2. #Declare Variables
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$subscriptionId = <YOUR SUBSCRIPTION ID> $tenantId = <YOUR TENANT ID> $securePassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force -String 'YOUR SECURE PASSWORD OF CHOICE' |
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by Arlan Nugara | Sep 27, 2018 | Azure, WordPress
We are currently using an expensive wildcard SSL certificate from a CA for all of our websites, that is expiring soon. Yes – there IS a very simple and straightforward way within Azure to add this wildcard certificate for multiple domain and sub-domain DEV, TEST and PROD Azure-hosted websites – but at an annual cost in excess of $750 Canadian dollars!
With Azure supporting use of Let’s Encrypt, the free, automated and open CA for Azure-hosted websites, we decided to secure all our websites with free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates working for each website before the expensive wildcard SSL expired.
NOTE: The Let’s Encrypt certificates DO expire after 90 days, so a background process using Azure Web Jobs, is necessary to automatically renew and install new certificates. Simon J.K.Pedersen has developed the Azure Let’s Encrypt Web App Site Extension to do the heavy lifting of requesting, installing and renewing of the Let’s Encrypt certificates. What a help this all is! Once the preparations are complete (as outlined below) the new Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate is working in less than 5 minutes.
After reading Simon’s documentation on How to Install, Known Issues, and How to Troubleshoot this is the process we used to change the SSL certificates on our websites. Simon J. K. Pedersen said he is actively working on an Azure extension to create a LetsEncrypt wildcard certificate. That will save even MORE time.
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