Use AKS Workload Identity to Login with "az login" in a Container with Azure CLI

 We have discussed "Setting Up Azure Workload Identity for Containers in Azure Kubernetes Services" previously. We can use Azure CLI  to interact with Azure resources in a container which is using base docker image "mcr.microsoft.com/azure-cli:latest-amd64". Instead of using specific credential information directly in the Azure CLI script in the container, we can use the workload identity to do an az login in a container where workload identity is enabled. Let's look at how to do that in this post.

Local Docker Container Run with DefaultAzureCredentials

 We discuss how to enable workload identity for continers running in AKS in the post "Setting Up Azure Workload Identity for Containers in Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) Using Terraform - Improved Security for Containers in AKS". However, when we use DefaultAzureCredentials and try to run docker containers locally from a development machine, we do not have the workload identity support. With Visual Studio we can run with the Azure AD user and run applications successfully. But if we are using a docker run command and run docker container locally, we will have to use app registration/service principal. Then we have to grant the service principal with required roles in Azure resources we would need to access from the application. Let's take a look at an example with Azure app config.

Setting Up Azure Workload Identity for Containers in Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) Using Terraform - Improved Security for Containers in AKS

 Azure Workload Identity allows your containers in AKS touse amanaged identity to access Azure resources securely without having to depend on connection strings, passwords, access keys or secrets. In other works you can just use DefaultAzureCredential in your containers running in AKS, which will be using workload identity assigned to the container, to get access to the required Azure resource. The roale based access permissions will be in effect and the user assigned managed identity (we can use AD app registration as well bu user assigned managed identity is recommended) used to setup the workload identity in AKS should be given the necessary roles in the target Azure resource. This is far better than having to store secrets or connection stigs to utilized by the dotnet applications. In this post let's understand how to setup workload identity in AKS deployed containers and explore how it simplifies the dotnet application code allowing the application to access Azure resources securely with a managed identity.

Full example source code with terraform and a .NET application using default credentials to access app config service and keyvault is available here in my GitHub repo,