Day -12 | Azure IAM from Basics | Azure Managed Identities Demo with Microsoft Entra (With Notes)

This Azure tutorial (Episode 12) explains Azure Identity and Access Management (IAM), covering authentication, authorization, roles, service principals, and managed identities. A demo shows secure file access from a VM to blob storage using managed identities, highlighting the difference between service principals and managed identities for resource-to-resource access. Github notes are provided. This segment uses a relatable office scenario to clearly explain the core concepts of authentication (verifying identity) and authorization (granting access privileges) within the context of Azure IAM. The analogy effectively bridges the gap between abstract security principles and practical application.This segment highlights the limitations of using root administrative access for all Azure users and introduces the concept of Identity and Access Management (IAM) as a solution. It emphasizes the importance of granular control and auditing to prevent unauthorized access and actions within the Azure environment.This segment details the practical implementation of IAM in Azure, explaining how to create users, group users for efficient management, and assign roles to control access permissions. It connects these actions to the earlier analogy, reinforcing the concepts of authentication and authorization.This segment clarifies the Azure service responsible for IAM—Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)—and explains its role in managing authentication and authorization. It also addresses the recent name change and clarifies the terminology.This segment shows a step-by-step demonstration of creating a new user in Azure and then highlighting the lack of access until specific roles are assigned. This visually reinforces the importance of authorization in controlling access to Azure resources. This segment introduces the concepts of service principals and managed identities, which are crucial for enabling secure communication between different Azure resources (e.g., virtual machines accessing storage accounts). It explains how these differ from user-based authentication and authorization. This segment clearly explains the key difference between managed identities and service principles in Azure. It highlights the significant advantage of managed identities: Azure handles the rotation and security of the service principal, reducing administrative overhead and improving security. The speaker simplifies a complex topic, making it easily understandable for viewers.This segment outlines the practical demonstration's setup. The speaker explains the scenario (connecting a virtual machine to a storage account to access files), its relevance to DevOps engineers, and the steps involved in creating the necessary resources (resource group, storage account, container, and virtual machine). This provides context for the following practical demonstration.This segment shows the creation of a resource group, storage account, and container within the Azure portal. The speaker provides clear instructions and explains each step, making it easy to follow along. This practical demonstration is valuable for viewers wanting to learn how to create these resources in Azure. This segment demonstrates how to enable a system-assigned managed identity for a virtual machine and assign it a role within a storage account. The speaker clearly explains the steps involved, including enabling the managed identity in the virtual machine settings and assigning the "Storage Blob Data Owner" role via the access control settings of the storage account. This practical demonstration is crucial for understanding the core concept of managed identities.