One of the solutions I am consulting on today is securing a number of APIs with OAuth with client credential flow, using Azure Active Directory as the identity provider. Those APIs are exposed via Azure API Management, which makes the validation of the access tokens provided as simple as injecting a policy at a product, API or operation level.
While this all works nicely, there is one item in this process which is a painpoint from an operations point of view: as they use client certificates to request access tokens, the certificate management is becoming a bit of a chore with the number of APIs and clients that access those APIs increasing.
A lot of those clients are either Azure Functions or Azure Logic Apps, which today provide the ability to using a managed identity to easy the burden of maintaining credentials.
So it was only logical to think about how would we be able to use the managed identities configured in both Azure Functions and Logic Apps to generate a token that can be validated by API Management. Turns out that this is quite possible, but needs a bit of preparation…
Continue reading “Calling API Management from Azure Function using Managed Identities”