Automating Azure Resource Manager

I’ve recently been (finally) getting to speed with Azure Resource Manager (ARM). It’s the management layer that drives the new Azure Portal and also features like Resource Groups and Role-Based Access Control.

You can interact with ARM in a number of ways:

To authenticate to the ARM API you need to use an Azure AD credential. This is all well and good if you are logged into the Portal, or running a script on your computer (where a web browser login prompt to Azure AD will pop up), but when automating your API calls that’s not available.

Luckily there is a post by David Ebbo that describes how to generate a Service Principal (equivalent of the concept of an Active Directory Service Account) attached to an Azure AD application.

The only problem with this post is that there are a few manual steps and it’s quite fiddly to do (by David’s own admission). I’ve developed a PowerShell module that you can use to idempotently create a Service Principal against either an entire Azure subscription or against a specific Resource Group that you can then use to automate your ARM code.

I’ve published the code to GitHub.

In order to use it you need to:

  1. Ensure you have the Windows Azure PowerShell commandlets installed
  2. Download the Set-ARMServicePrincipalCredential.psm1 file from my GitHub repository
  3. Download the Azure Key Vault PowerShell commandlets and put the AADGraph.ps1 file next to the file from GitHub
  4. Execute the Set-ARMServicePrincipalCredential command as per the examples on GitHub

This will pop up a web browser prompt to authenticate (this will happen twice since I’m using two disjointed libraries - hopefully this will get resolved if Azure AD commandlets end up becoming integrated with the Azure Commandlets) give you the following information:

  • Tenant ID
  • Client ID
  • Password

From there you have all the information you need to authenticate your automated script with ARM.

If using PowerShell then this will look like:

    $securePassword = ConvertTo-SecureString $Password -AsPlainText -Force
    $servicePrincipalCredentials = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ($ClientId, $securePassword)
    Add-AzureAccount -ServicePrincipal -Tenant $TenantId -Credential $servicePrincipalCredentials | Out-Null

If using ARMClient then this will look like:

    armclient spn $TenantId $ClientId $Password | Out-Null

One last note: make sure you store the password securely when automating the script, e.g. TeamCity password, Bamboo password or Octopus sensitive variable.