A managed identity is an Azure feature that provides cloud services (VMs, App Services, Functions) with an automatically managed identity in Entra ID — allowing the service to authenticate to other Azure resources without storing any credentials in code.
⚙️ How Does It Work?
Azure automatically creates and manages the credential lifecycle. The service requests a token from the Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS), which returns a short-lived access token. The receiving service validates the token against Entra ID.
📍 Where Is It Used?
Any Azure workload (VMs, App Services, AKS, Logic Apps) that needs to access other Azure services like Key Vault, Storage, or SQL Database without credentials in code.
💡 Real-World Example
An Azure Function needs to read secrets from Key Vault. Instead of storing a client secret or certificate, it uses a system-assigned managed identity. Azure handles the entire credential lifecycle automatically — the developer writes zero credential management code.
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