Azure Arc

Every year, Microsoft holds its annual BUILD conference where they “announce new tools and solutions to empower developers to solve real world problems”, it’s also a great time to pick up some new skills and connect with the wider developer communities. If you’ve attended any of the Microsoft conferences in the last few years, you would’ve seen a steady increase in hybrid content and solutions, as the world starts to realise that ‘Cloud-native’ doesn’t need to mean ‘Cloud-only’.

One of the awesome features of Azure VMs has been that they have their own identity in Azure AD, much like traditional servers on-prem have had computer accounts in Active Directory, and these identities can be used to authenticate against other Azure services such as Azure KeyVault. Thanks to this native ability, it’s been possible to securely store objects such as secrets for User accounts, API Keys and things like Certificates in KeyVault and access them from other Azure Resources without having to create and store credentials those services.