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Service Principal

A service principal is an identity used by an application or service in Azure to authenticate and access resources in a secure, controlled manner — the machine equivalent of a user account for applications running on Azure.

Cloud Azure NHI Identity

❓ What is Service Principal?

A service principal is an identity used by an application or service in Azure to authenticate and access resources in a secure, controlled manner — the machine equivalent of a user account for applications running on Azure.

⚙️ How Does It Work?

Service principals are registered in Entra ID and assigned roles/permissions. They authenticate using client secrets, certificates, or federated credentials. Managed Identities are a special type of service principal with automatically managed credentials.

📍 Where Is It Used?

Azure cloud environments — any application, automation script, or CI/CD pipeline needing to access Azure resources programmatically.

💡 Real-World Example

A CI/CD pipeline needs to deploy Azure infrastructure. Instead of using a developer's personal credentials, a service principal with Contributor role scoped to the specific resource group is created. The pipeline authenticates with a certificate — no human credentials involved in deployments.

🔗 Related Terms

Managed Identity Azure Non-Human Identity Service Account Least Privilege
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