Continuing on my journey to learn Terraform, I wanted to explore the idea of authenticating Terraform to Azure. Terraform, as we know, is an infrastructure automation tool, and this authentication technique allows us to create/manage resources on the Azure cloud platform. I came across two insightful articles on Azure Service Principals that helped me understand the how’s and what’s of the service principal. Here are the links to those -Ned Belavance’s Demystifying Azure AD Service Principals and Microsoft Docs Following the instructions there, I identified three steps to the objective.

Step 1: Create a Service Principal Here is code of the service principal provisioning command I ran on Azure portal command prompt: https://gist.github.com/kunduso/580b0c13875f1d841f252fe482d5db41 With these values in hand, it was now time to head over to Terraform and provide those credentials for Terraform to be able to access my Azure subscription. Step 2: Update terraform configuration files I followed the instructions here to create the Azure provider usage and authentication. https://gist.github.com/kunduso/915f67b1a20233d36c88294a1209d2d0 https://gist.github.com/kunduso/a301d2616e7eede2cd33b30a60f139fa The documentation was precise on what values were required. I also know that these are secured credentials and that they need to be managed carefully. I came across an approach to declare variables in a variables.tf file and place actual values in a .tfvar https://gist.github.com/kunduso/bae6d4688c646776afd901ae5785b197 Step 3: Execute terraform trio commands (init -> plan -> apply) At the end of terraform apply I was able to verify that a resource group was created under my subscription on the Azure portal. Conclusion:The purpose of this note was to authenticate Terraform, and we saw that with the creation of a resource group in Azure. Other ideas to explore:Is this the best method to be able to authenticate Terraform? How to authenticate Terraform to AWS using an IAM user?