How to configure Azure credentials using a service principal

Radius authenticates to Azure with a service principal to deploy and connect to Azure resources. This guide creates a service principal and registers it as an Azure credential in the Radius control plane.

Step 1: Create a service principal

Radius authenticates to Azure with a service principal. Create one and note the appId, password, and tenant:

az ad sp create-for-rbac

{
  "appId": "****",
  "displayName": "****",
  "password": "****",
  "tenant": "****"
}

Grant the service principal access to the resource group using the Azure role that allows creating the resources you plan to deploy.

Step 2a: Interactively via rad initialize

If Radius has not been installed already, rad initialize --full can be used to interactively install Radius and configure an Azure service principal at the same time.

rad initialize --full --preview

Follow the prompts:

1. When prompted with “Add cloud providers for cloud resources?”, select Yes.
2. Select Azure, then Service Principal.
3. Enter the appId, password, and tenant recorded in Step 1.
4. Enter the Azure subscription ID and resource group to use for the default Environment. The resource group must already exist.

Step 2b: Manual configuration

Create the Azure credential in the Radius control plane with rad credential register azure sp:

rad credential register azure sp \
  --client-id myClientId \
  --client-secret myClientSecret \
  --tenant-id myTenantId

Radius will use the provided service principal for all interactions with Azure.

Step 3: Update existing Environments

If you have existing Environments, you must also update your Environments with your Azure subscription ID and resource group. The resource group must already exist:

rad environment update myEnvironment \
  --azure-subscription-id myAzureSubscriptionId \
  --azure-resource-group myAzureResourceGroup \
  --preview

This command updates the configuration of an environment for properties that are able to be changed. For more information visit rad environment update.

Next steps

Once AWS or Azure credentials are configured, set up access to the Radius Dashboard.