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Cloud Computing · Intermediate

Service Principal

Security identity in an Entra tenant representing an application or automation tool that needs access to resources.

Definition

When an application is registered, Entra ID creates an application object (the global definition) and a service principal (its local instance in a tenant). Service principals authenticate with a client secret, certificate or federated credential and are granted Azure RBAC roles. Managed identities are a special type of service principal.

Example

A CI/CD pipeline authenticates to Azure as a service principal using workload identity federation with GitHub.

Exam tip

Prefer managed identities for Azure-hosted workloads and certificates or federated credentials over client secrets for service principals.

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