Authentication

The Upbound Official Azure Provider supports multiple authentication methods.

Upbound auth (OIDC)

Note
This method of authentication is only supported in managed control planes running on Upbound Cloud Spaces

When your control plane runs in an Upbound Cloud Space, you can use this authentication method. Upbound authentication uses OpenID Connect (OIDC) to authenticate to Azure without requiring you to store credentials in Upbound.

Create an identity pool

  1. Open the Azure portal.
  2. Select Microsoft Entra ID.
  3. If this is your first time registering Upbound as an identity provider in Microsoft Entra ID, select App registrations
  4. At the top of the page, select New registration.
  5. Name the pool, like upbound-oidc-provider.
  6. In the Supported account types section select Accounts in this organizational directory only.
  7. In the Redirect URI section select Web and leave the URL field blank.
  8. Select Register.

Create a federated credential

To allow the upbound-oidc-provider registration created in the previous step to trust your control plane in Upbound, do the following in the resource view.

  1. Select Certificates and secrets in the left navigation.
  2. Select Federated credentials tab.
  3. Select Add credential.
  4. In Federated credential scenario select Other Issuer.
  5. In Issuer enter https://proidc.upbound.io.
  6. In Subject identifier enter:
mcp::provider:provider-azure
  1. In Credential details name enter:
upbound--provider-azure
  1. In Credential details description enter:
upbound MCP  Provider provider-azure
  1. Leave Audience unmodified with api://AzureADTokenExchange.
  2. Select Add.

Grant permissions to the service principal

For your control plane to be able to perform actions required by this configuration, you need to grant permissions to the Application Service Principal. Assign a role to the Application Service Principal by following instructions at Assign a role to the application.

  1. Open the Azure portal
  2. Select Subscriptions.
  3. Select your subscription.
  4. Select Access control (IAM) in the left navigation.
  5. Select Add and select Add role assignment.
  6. Find and select the Contributor role on the Privileged administrator roles tab.
  7. Select Next.
  8. In Assign access to select User, group, or service principal.
  9. Select Select members.
  10. Find your application by entering upbound-oidc-provider in the search field.
  11. Select Select.
  12. Select Review + assign.
  13. Make sure everything is correct and press Review + assign again.

Create a ProviderConfig

Create a ProviderConfig to set the provider authentication method to Upbound .

Supply the Application (client) ID , Directory (tenant) ID , and Subscription ID found in the previous section.

Tip
To apply Upbound based authentication by default name the ProviderConfig default .
apiVersion: azure.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: Upbound
  clientID: <client ID>
  tenantID: <tenant ID>
  subscriptionID: <subscription ID>

Service principal with Kubernetes secret

A service principal is an application within the Azure Active Directory that passes client_id, client_secret, and tenant_id authentication tokens to create and manage Azure resources. As an alternative, it can also authenticate with a client_certificate instead of a client_secret

Create a service principal with client secret credentials using the Azure CLI tool

Tip
If you don’t have the Azure CLI, use the install guide

First, find the Subscription ID for your Azure account.

az account list

Note the value of the id in the return output.

Next, create a service principle Owner role. Update the <subscription_id> with the id from the previous command.

az ad sp create-for-rbac --sdk-auth --role Owner --scopes /subscriptions/<subscription_id> \
  > azure.json

The azure.json file in the preceding command contains the client ID, secret, and tenant ID of your subscription.

Next, use kubectl to associate your Azure credentials file with a generic Kubernetes secret.

kubectl create secret generic azure-secret -n upbound-system --from-file=creds=./azure.json

Create a service principal with client certificate credentials using the Azure CLI tool

You can create Azure service principals with a client certificate instead of a client secret as credentials. When creating the service principal, Azure CLI provides the options to generate client certificate automatically or set your own custom certificate.

Create a service principal with a generated client certificate:

The following command creates a service principal with your custom certificate

# set your subscription ID
AZ_SUBSCRIPTION_ID="11111111-1111-1111-1111-1111111111111"
az ad sp create-for-rbac --sdk-auth \
                         --role Owner \
                         --scopes /subscriptions/"${AZ_SUBSCRIPTION_ID}" \
                         --create-cert > azure_credentials.json

The azure_credentials.json file in the preceding command contains:

  • the client ID,
  • the path of the generated client certificate file in your local machine
  • tenant ID of your subscription

It looks like the following:

{
  "clientId": "1111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555",
  "clientCertificate": "/path/to/generatedcert.pem",
  "subscriptionId": "22222222-3333-4444-5555-666666666666",
  "tenantId": "33333333-4444-5555-6666-777777777777",
  "activeDirectoryEndpointUrl": "https://login.microsoftonline.com",
  "resourceManagerEndpointUrl": "https://management.azure.com/",
  "activeDirectoryGraphResourceId": "https://graph.windows.net/",
  "sqlManagementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net:8443/",
  "galleryEndpointUrl": "https://gallery.azure.com/",
  "managementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net/"
}

The generated certificate looks like the following:

-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
...
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

To use this configuration with the Upbound Azure Provider, you should replace clientCertificate field with the certificate content. You should first convert the certificate to PKCS12 format, then encode it with base64.

# extract the path of the generated PEM certificate
AZ_CLIENT_CERT_PEM_PATH="$(jq -r '.clientCertificate' azure_credentials.json)"

# convert PEM to PKCS12 using openssl tool
openssl pkcs12 -export \
               -out azure_sp_cert.pkcs12 \
               -in "${AZ_CLIENT_CERT_PEM_PATH}" \
               -inkey "${AZ_CLIENT_CERT_PEM_PATH}" \
               -passout pass:

# encode the certificate
base64 -i azure_sp_cert.pkcs12 | tr -d '\n' > azure_sp_cert_pkcs12_base64encoded

# replace clientCertificate field in azure_credentials.json with base64-encoded certificate content
jq --rawfile certcontent azure_sp_cert_pkcs12_base64encoded \
    '.clientCertificate=$certcontent' azure_credentials.json > azure_credentials_withcert.json

The preceding command snippet should generate the file azure_credentials_withcert.json that looks like following:

{
  "clientId": "1111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555",
  "clientCertificate": "XXXXX......XXX",
  "subscriptionId": "22222222-3333-4444-5555-666666666666",
  "tenantId": "33333333-4444-5555-6666-777777777777",
  "activeDirectoryEndpointUrl": "https://login.microsoftonline.com",
  "resourceManagerEndpointUrl": "https://management.azure.com/",
  "activeDirectoryGraphResourceId": "https://graph.windows.net/",
  "sqlManagementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net:8443/",
  "galleryEndpointUrl": "https://gallery.azure.com/",
  "managementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net/"
}

Next, use kubectl to associate your Azure credentials file with a generic Kubernetes secret.

kubectl create secret generic azure-secret -n upbound-system --from-file=creds=./azure_credentials_withcert.json

Create a service principal with your own client certificate:

Azure service principals accept custom certificates in an ASCII format such as PEM, CER, or DER. When using a certificate with PEM format, the certificate file should include both the certificate and private key appended. See Microsoft Azure Service Principal Documentation for reference

The following command creates a service principal with your custom certificate. You can choose one of the options. First option lets you specify cert from a file, the second option lets you directly specify the cert content as a string.

# option 1 - load cert from file 
az ad sp create-for-rbac --sdk-auth \
                         --role Owner \
                         --scopes /subscriptions/"${AZ_SUBSCRIPTION_ID}" \
                         --cert @/path/to/yourcert.pem > azure_credentials.json

# option 2 - set cert directly from string
az ad sp create-for-rbac --sdk-auth \
                         --role Owner \
                         --scopes /subscriptions/"${AZ_SUBSCRIPTION_ID}" \
                         --cert "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\n...-----END CERTIFICATE-----" > azure_credentials.json

The preceding command generates the azure_credentials.json file, which has the following content. Since you used a custom certificate, note that clientCertificate is null in the output.

{
  "clientId": "1111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555",
  "clientCertificate": null,
  "subscriptionId": "22222222-3333-4444-5555-666666666666",
  "tenantId": "33333333-4444-5555-6666-777777777777",
  "activeDirectoryEndpointUrl": "https://login.microsoftonline.com",
  "resourceManagerEndpointUrl": "https://management.azure.com/",
  "activeDirectoryGraphResourceId": "https://graph.windows.net/",
  "sqlManagementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net:8443/",
  "galleryEndpointUrl": "https://gallery.azure.com/",
  "managementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net/"
}

Upbound Azure Provider accepts certificates in base64-encoded PKCS12 format. Convert your certificate to PKCS12 format, then encode it with base64 for provider usage. Add the resulting string to the clientCertificate field of azure_credentials.json

In the snippet below, you can find example commands for PEM certificate to PKCS12 conversion using openssl. If your certificate is in other formats than PEM, you can convert it to PEM, then use following commands for PKCS12 conversion. Other alternative conversions are out-of-scope for this document and left to the user. If you already have your certificate in PKCS12 format, you can skip the conversion and move to base64 encode step.

# convert PEM to PKCS12 using openssl tool
openssl pkcs12 -export \
               -out azure_sp_cert.pkcs12 \
               -in "/path/to/your/cert.pem" \
               -inkey "/path/to/your/key.pem" \
               -passout pass:

# encode 
base64 -i azure_sp_cert.pkcs12 | tr -d '\n' >  azure_sp_cert_pkcs12_base64encoded

# replace clientCertificate field in azure_credentials.json with base64-encoded certificate content
jq --rawfile certcontent azure_sp_cert_pkcs12_base64encoded \
    '.clientCertificate=$certcontent' azure_credentials.json > azure_credentials_withcert.json

The preceding command snippet should generate the file azure_credentials_withcert.json that looks like the following:

If you have a password-protected PKCS12 certificate, you should also set clientCertificatePassword field in the azure_credentials_withcert.json, if not you can omit.

{
  "clientId": "1111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555",
  "clientCertificate": "XXXXX......XXX",
  "clientCertificatePassword": "YourClientCertificatePassword",
  "subscriptionId": "22222222-3333-4444-5555-666666666666",
  "tenantId": "33333333-4444-5555-6666-777777777777",
  "activeDirectoryEndpointUrl": "https://login.microsoftonline.com",
  "resourceManagerEndpointUrl": "https://management.azure.com/",
  "activeDirectoryGraphResourceId": "https://graph.windows.net/",
  "sqlManagementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net:8443/",
  "galleryEndpointUrl": "https://gallery.azure.com/",
  "managementEndpointUrl": "https://management.core.windows.net/"
}

Use kubectl to associate your Azure credentials file with a generic Kubernetes secret.

kubectl create secret generic azure-secret -n upbound-system --from-file=creds=./azure_credentials_withcert.json

Configure your provider

Apply these changes to your ProviderConfig file.

apiVersion: azure.upbound.io/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: default
kind: ProviderConfig
spec:
  credentials:
    source: Secret
    secretRef:
      namespace: upbound-system
      name: azure-secret
      key: creds

Your credential source must be Secret and you must specify the namespace, name, and key if you used different values.

Apply your configuration.

System-assigned managed identity

The system-assigned managed identity allows you to associate the provider with your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster automatically without manually managing credentials.

Create a system-assigned managed identity

A system-assigned managed identity is automatically created when you create an AKS cluster. This section covers creating a new identity in a new cluster.

Create a resource group.

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location westus2

Create an AKS cluster with the --enable-managed-identity flag.

az aks create -g myResourceGroup -n myManagedCluster --enable-managed-identity

Use the aks get-credentials command to generate the kubeconfig file for your AKS cluster. This file contains the authentication and connection information for your cluster.

az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myManagedCluster

To switch from a service principal to a system-assigned managed identity, use the aks update command.

az aks update -g myResourceGroup -n myManagedCluster --enable-managed-identity

Configure your provider

In your provider configuration, update the source, subscriptionID, and tenantID in the credentials field.

apiVersion: azure.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: SystemAssignedManagedIdentity
  subscriptionID: <subscription_ID>
  tenantID: <tenant_ID>

User-assigned managed identity

User-assigned managed identities exist independent of any other Azure resource, unlike system-assigned managed identities. If your organization needs to use a single identity across multiple resources, this option allows you to create one authentication identity with fixed permissions.

Note
You must use the user-assigned managed identity as the kubelet identity of your AKS cluster.

First, create a new control plane identity with the Azure CLI. Update <controlplane_identity_name> with a name for your new managed identity.

az identity create --name <controlplane_identity_name> --resource-group <resource_group>

Your output should return the following fields:

{
  "clientId": "<client_id>",
  "clientSecretUrl": "<clientSecretUrl>",
  "id": "/subscriptions/<subscriptionid>/resourcegroups/<resource_group/providers/Microsoft.ManagedIdentity/userAssignedIdentities/<controlplane_identity_name>", 
  "location": "<location>",
  "name": "<identity_name>",
  "principalId": "<principal_id>",
  "resourceGroup": "<resource_group>",                       
  "tags": {},
  "tenantId": "<tenant_id>",
  "type": "Microsoft.ManagedIdentity/userAssignedIdentities"
}

Capture the id field output as your control plane identity.

Next, create a kubelet managed identity.

az identity create --name <kubelet_identity_name> --resource-group <resource_group>

Capture the id field output as your kubelet identity.

Next, create an AKS cluster with the identities you created in the preceding command.

az aks create \
    --resource-group <resource_group> \
    --name <cluster_name> \
    --network-plugin azure \
    --vnet-subnet-id <subnet_id> \
    --docker-bridge-address <docker_bridge_address> \
    --dns-service-ip <dns_ip> \
    --service-cidr <service_cidr> \
    --enable-managed-identity \
    --assign-identity <controlplane_identity_resource_id> \ 
    --assign-kubelet-identity <kubelet_identity_resource_id>

Configure your provider

In your provider configuration, update the source, subscriptionID, and tenantID in the credentials field. Update the clientID field with the user-assigned managed identity you used as the kubelet identity.

apiVersion: azure.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: UserAssignedManagedIdentity
  clientID: <kubelet_identity_id>
  subscriptionID: <subscription_ID>
  tenantID: <tenant_ID>
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