Microsoft plans to retire Azure Automation Run As Accounts on September 30, 2023 and replace them with managed identities. I don’t have any issue with the proposal because managed identities are more secure and a better overall solution. It would have been nice if Microsoft had communicated the change more broadly. I guess if you were in the know, you found out about this development, but maybe the average Microsoft 365 tenant administrator might have struggled to discover what’s happening.
Before an app or an Azure Automation account can use the Teams PowerShell cmdlets in a script or runbook, it must have the permission to act as an administrator. In this article, we cover how to assign the necessary role to a service principal.
I’ve spent some time investigating Azure Automation PowerShell recently. In this article, I discuss three learnings that might be of interest to others. Debugging, cost, and tracking the use of Azure Automation PowerShell might not interest everyone, but they’ve certainly helped me to understand how the platform works.
A previous article explains how to use an Azure Automation runbook to write information to a SharePoint Online site and Teams channel. At the time, I used a stored credential to authenticate and access SharePoint and Teams. Azure Key Vault offers another way to store secrets (bits of information) securely. This article explores how to store secrets in Azure Key Vault and retrieve and use the secrets in a runbook script and interactive PowerShell.
Office 365 tenants using Azure AD external identities (like Azure B2B Collaboration guest accounts with apps like Teams) are moving to a monthly active users (MAU) billing model. The new model replaces the 1;5 ratio for Azure AD premium licenses used up to now. Microsoft allows tenants to have the first 50,000 unique external identities free of charge each month and bills for access thereafter. If you don’t already have an Azure subscription, you’ll need one to link to Azure AD. Linking the subscription should be an easy task, until it’s not…
A recent report puts the availability of Azure behind Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Office 365 tenants depend on Azure in a variety of ways. The recent problems occurred in a variety of places and there’s no common thread connecting the different issues. It seems like Azure has had a run of bad luck, so let’s hope that the bad days have passed and reliability improves.
