Introduction to authentication and authorization

The vast majority of applications will need some form of authentication and authorization (A&A). Authentication is the process of proving who you are, while authorization is the process of determining whether you have permission to do what you are trying to do. Typically, you authenticate first, perhaps once per session, and then authorization is checked for each action you attempt.

There are many different types of A&A, but since we’re focusing mostly on Azure, we’ll use their built-in feature set colloquially known as Easy Auth.