[AAD] How to create Service Principal through CLI

There are multiple ways to generate the Service Principal for Azure AD. Say, through portal, CLI or PowerShell. I always used Azure portal for this registration. But started liking CLI way of generating principal which is very simple and easy to register and generate the required keys and move on. Yes, many times you would find this step as a prerequisites or in mid way to continue say Azure Data Lake Analytics query or ADAL programming.

$ az login

$ az account list -o table

$ az ad sp create-for-rbac --name MikkyDemoTraining --years 1

output:
{
"appId": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
"displayName": "MikkyDemoTraining",
"name": "http://MikkyDemoTraining",
"password": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
"tenant": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"
}

Ps: Take note of the password value for later references, otherwise you may need to regenerate again.

For more detail – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/create-an-azure-service-principal-azure-cli?view=azure-cli-latest

[Linux] How to login Azure Linux VM’s using SSH key pair

This post is for Linux newbies trying to figure out SSH way login to Azure Linux VM. I am following the steps explained here. Had seen many times our windows users struggle to get this right at first shot. Hope the below screenshots are clear to follow and achieve easy logon. Ps note, there are many ways to get this done but I felt this as the quick way to get it right without jumping between tools/sites.

Step 1: I am using WSL but you can try Git Bash or bitvise or Putty or Tux vm or any other SSH client of your choice.

Pls note down the Key passphrase safely. This is required when we SSH to Linux VM from $ terminal.

Step 2: You would see the public and private keys generated at the path ~/.ssh. Cat out the id_rsa.pub file to grab the public key which is required when creating Azure Linux VM.

Step 3: Paste the above Public key at the time of VM creation in portal or CLI

Step 4: Once the VM is created, copy the SSH command to logon

Step 5: Go back to the your favorite SSH client and run the above copied command. Pls note, it will prompt for the passphrase which you have to enter now. On success, you would see your remote machine terminal.

Let me know if you see this helps you in some way.

Happy learning !

[Azure PaaS] Why to consider Azure PaaS?

Happy new year ! As a Technical Evangelist, I work with bunch of ISV’s where I meet technical architects for engagements which includes Architectural design talk, review or POC’s assistance. To me, its easy to work with and explain Uber architects vs PowerPoint architects who resist PaaS services aggressively and often describe it’s a burden for them. As a leader in PaaS offerings, we encourages developers/startups to focus on their “apps” rather spending time on managing the underlying resources. It gives us a “real” freedom to operate cloud easily and also provide easy integration happy path to various tools, reports and monitoring. Here
I wanted to list out the advantages of adapting PaaS Service over IaaS.

1) Open and Hybrid: Azure is committed to being open and speak customer languages of their choice and platforms they prefer. We openly work with many open source communities, integrating the demands, acknowledging the development community movement and also contribute the same fix back to the community repos. By this way, It put us on a win/win situation. Hybrid path and options in Azure is so useful for someone to leverage their existing on Premise investments. Azure PaaS provides high control, high productivity + Intelligence platform which you can consider for both Open source and Hybrid scenario’s.

2) Data-driven Intelligence: Azure is the “only” cloud provider which provides comprehensive monitoring solutions to monitor both Cloud and On- Premises in a single pane. It has Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Insights etc helps to get various intelligence about the services easily. It also has the Azure Security Centre to helps us easily detect threats early and avoid false positives.

3) Continuous Innovation: Azure services can be easily integrated with VSTS which provides an end to end DevOps having planning, build & release and required tools. Azure Cognitive and AI services is way ahead of other providers. In fact, Azure provides 29 API’s for Cognitive Service which is a true value proposition and also a sign of Innovation.

4) Cross Platform: Using VS tools for Xamarin, developers can build native Android, iOS and windows apps sharing 90% of the code across device platforms. Non developers can also build scalable applications for desktop and mobile on top of cloud & On Premise services using PowerApps (no coding skills required).

5) Productivity & Tools: Azure offers unparalleled developer productivity tools for PaaS Development with Visual Studio through which one can even step into remote codes in few mins(remote debugging). 

Do you still believe as a burden?

#StayLearning..