Azure Key Vault Cheat Sheet

• A service that allows you to store tokens, passwords, certificates, and other secrets.
• You can also create and manage the keys used to encrypt your data.

Features

• Soft delete allows a deleted key vault and its objects to be retrieved during the retention time you designate.
• The retention period of a deleted vault is between 7 to 90 days.
• With soft-delete and purge protection enabled, it will not purge a vault or object in the deleted state until the retention period has expired.

• You may connect to a key vault via
  • A public endpoint in all networks
  • A public endpoint in selected networks
  • A private endpoint
• Share access to your applications and resources without revealing your credentials.

Concepts

• A tenant is a representation of an organization.
  • Azure Active Directory allows you to publish multi-tenant applications.
  • Azure Active Directory (B2C) tenant represents a collection of identities.
• A vault owner enables you to create a key vault and set up an auditing log of who has access to secrets and keys.
• A vault consumer can only perform actions on the assets inside the key vault if the vault owner grants the consumer access.
• A manageable item in Azure is called resource, and resource groups are containers that hold related resources.
• Service principal gives you control over which resources can be accessed. At the same time, a managed identity eliminates the need for you to create and manage service principals directly since it provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure AD.
• You can identify an Azure AD instance within your Azure subscription using a tenant ID.
• An access policy grants the service principal (user group or application) permissions to perform various operations on Azure Key Vault keys, secrets, and certificates.
  • You can also configure the access policy from a template.
  • With access policy, you can enable access to:
    • Azure Virtual Machines for deployment – this will permit the VMs to retrieve certificates stored as secrets from the key vault.
    • Azure Resource Manager for template deployment – if this option is enabled, the ARM is permitted to retrieve secrets from the key vault.
    • Azure Disk Encryption for volume encryption – grants permission to retrieve secrets from the key vault and unwrap keys.
  • You can select a permission model between vault access policy or Azure RBAC.

Azure Key Vault Pricing

• You are charged if the key has been used at least once in the last 30 days (based on the key’s creation date).
• You are charged for each historical version of a key.

Want to learn more about Azure? Watch the official Microsoft Azure YouTube channel’s video series called Azure Tips and Tricks.

Azure Key Vault Cheat Sheet References:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/general/overview
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key-vault/