Managing identities, keys, and secrets across different data platform technologies

There are mainly two technologies used in Azure for managing identities, keys, secrets, certificates, and basically anything confidential. They are Azure Active Directory (AAD) and Azure Key Vault. We looked briefly into Azure Key Vault earlier in this chapter in the Encryption at rest in Azure Storage section. Let's look into both of these services in detail here.

Azure Active Directory

AAD is Azure's identity and access management service. It supports managing users, groups, service principals, and so on. You can think of service principals as the service accounts used to run applications automatically. These service principals are also called AAD applications.

Let's now see an example of creating users in AAD:

1. From the Azure portal, search for AAD or Azure Active Directory, and select that service.
2. Once inside, you can click on the Users tab under the Manage category...