Microsoft Azure integration

What is Microsoft Azure?

It is a cloud-based platform developed by Microsoft, offering a suite of services with computing, analytics, storage and networking capabilities, which can all be conveniently managed through the Azure portal.

Azure's support for third-party services allows their users to make use of various solutions outside of Microsoft's offerings, addressing a wide range of development needs and business processes.

Integrating the service with Buddy lets you automate workflows using Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.

Buddy provides dedicated actions that allow you to deploy to Azure Storage, push to App Service, as well as handle AKS cluster in Kubernetes actions.

In addition, by using the Azure CLI action you can perform operations on other services, such as Azure Functions or Azure Logic Apps.

Image loading...Pipeline example for Azure integration

Setting up Azure integration

  1. Open the Integrations tab in Buddy and click New integration.
  2. Look up and click Azure Cloud (it can be found under the IaaS category):

Image loading...Azure Cloud integration selection

  1. The configuration window will show up:

Image loading...Azure Cloud integration configuration

Here you have to provide:

Hint
You can adjust the privacy settings of your integration (i.e. who can use it and where) in the Sharing tab.

Types of Azure integration

There are two integration solutions to authenticate in Azure:

  1. By creating a service principal.
  2. By using the OIDC identity provider.

Service principal

Azure requires automated tools, such as Buddy, to be represented by a service principal to access resources secured by an Azure AD tenant.

To create a service principal in Azure, use the Azure CLI on your local machine.

Tip
Alternatively, you can create a service principal using the Cloud Shell, which you can access directly from the Azure Portal.

Follow these steps:

  1. Install Azure CLI.
  2. Run az login to sign in to your Azure account.
  3. Run az ad sp create-for-rbac --name {SP_NAME} to create a new app and service principal with the set display name.

This creates a new app that supports a single tenant with the default Contributor role assignment. The details of the app and the service principal are displayed after the command runs successfully:

Image loading...Service principal details

Copy the details of the new app - appId, password, and tenant. You need them to configure the integration in Buddy.

Danger
Make sure to copy the service principal password as you won't be able to retrieve it after you close the terminal window. If you need to access it at a later date, you must reset the service principal credentials and get a new password.
  1. Once created, paste the App ID, Tenant ID and Service principal password in the integration configuration window in Buddy.

Image loading...Azure authorization configuration

OIDC

To integrate with OIDC, jump to our dedicated article on integrating Azure services with Buddy pipelines over OIDC.

Last modified on Jan 29, 2025