Managed-Identity

We spent hours debugging connectivity when the real issue was authentication. Here is why identity failures masquerade as network failures. The Error Message Lies Your app cannot connect to Azure SQL. The error says: “Connection timeout.” You check: firewall rules network security groups VNET configuration DNS resolution Everything looks correct. The issue is not networking. It is identity. The Managed Identity does not have permissions on the database. But the error said “timeout,” not “access denied.” ...

Service principals never clean themselves up. And no one remembers why they exist. Here is how we ended up with hundreds of them. They Start With Good Intentions Someone needs to deploy an app. They create a service principal. Someone needs a CI/CD pipeline. Another service principal. Someone needs cross-tenant access. One more. Each one made sense at the time. Each one solved a real problem. None of them had an expiration date. ...

The quiet upgrade most teams underestimate. When we first adopted Managed Identity, it felt incremental. No big architecture change. No dramatic security announcement. Just fewer secrets. What surprised us was not what it replaced. It was what it quietly removed. The Problems We Thought We Had Before Managed Identity, most of our security conversations focused on symptoms. rotating credentials expiring secrets leaked connection strings confusing access reviews We assumed these were the core problems. ...