The authentication landscape in Azure has changed a lot. Traditionally applications used certificates, keys, passwords and many other things to be able to connect to external resources. Sometimes these methods still apply and are valid to use, but most of the time they can be insecure and are very annoying to maintain. These days authentication through identity is very popular and makes maintenance a joke.

In this session I will show you what managed identities are, we will have a look into what the difference is between system-assigned and user-assigned identities and we will dive into an example application which leverages managed identities. We will also dive into using managed identities with Azure SQL Server and the quirks you need to think about.