This article highlights why API governance is important and covers a few API governance best practices. The Primary Goal of API Governance: Consistency The number of companies that consider themselves a platform provider is increasing, and so is the number of companies building APIs and applications.
-->Key Vault allows you to securely access sensitive information from within your applications:
- Keys and secrets are protected without having to write the code yourself and you are easily able to use them from your applications.
- You are able to have your customers own and manage their own keys so you can concentrate on providing the core software features. In this way, your applications will not own the responsibility or potential liability for your customers' tenant keys and secrets.
- Your application can use keys for signing and encryption yet keeps the key management external from your application, allowing your solution to be suitable as a geographically distributed app.
- Manage Key Vault certificates. For more information, see Certificates
For more general information on Azure Key Vault, see What is Key Vault).
Public Previews
Periodically, we release a public preview of a new Key Vault feature. Try out these and let us know what you think via azurekeyvault@microsoft.com, our feedback email address.
Creating and Managing Key Vaults
Azure Key Vault provides a way to securely store credentials and other keys and secrets, but your code needs to authenticate to Key Vault to retrieve them. Managed identities for Azure resources makes solving this problem simpler by giving Azure services an automatically managed identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). You can use this identity to authenticate to any service that supports Azure AD authentication, including Key Vault, without having any credentials in your code.
For more information on managed identities for Azure resources, see the managed identities overview. For more information on working with Azure AD, see Integrating applications with Azure Active Directory.
Before working with keys, secrets or certificates in your key vault, you'll create and manage your key vault through CLI, PowerShell, Resource Manager Templates or REST, as described in the following articles:
Coding with Key Vault
The Key Vault management system for programmers consists of several interfaces. This section contains links to all of the languages as well as some code examples.
Supported programming and scripting languages
REST
All of your Key Vault resources are accessible through the REST interface; vaults, keys, secrets, etc.
Key Vault REST API Reference.
.NET
.NET API reference for Key Vault.
For more information on the 2.x version of the .NET SDK, see the Release notes.
Java
Node.js
In Node.js, the Key Vault management API and the Key Vault object API are separate. The following overview article gives you access to both.
Python
Azure CLI
Azure PowerShell
Code examples
For complete examples using Key Vault with your applications, see:
- Azure Key Vault code samples - Code Samples for Azure Key Vault.
- Use Azure Key Vault from a Web Application - tutorial to help you learn how to use Azure Key Vault from a web application in Azure.
How-tos
The following articles and scenarios provide task-specific guidance for working with Azure Key Vault:
- Change key vault tenant ID after subscription move - When you move your Azure subscription from tenant A to tenant B, your existing key vaults are inaccessible by the principals (users and applications) in tenant B. Fix this using this guide.
- Accessing Key Vault behind firewall - To access a key vault your key vault client application needs to be able to access multiple end-points for various functionalities.
- How to Generate and Transfer HSM-Protected Keys for Azure Key Vault - This will help you plan for, generate and then transfer your own HSM-protected keys to use with Azure Key Vault.
- How to pass secure values (such as passwords) during deployment - When you need to pass a secure value (like a password) as a parameter during deployment, you can store that value as a secret in an Azure Key Vault and reference the value in other Resource Manager templates.
- How to use Key Vault for extensible key management with SQL Server - The SQL Server Connector for Azure Key Vault enables SQL Server and SQL-in-a-VM to leverage the Azure Key Vault service as an Extensible Key Management (EKM) provider to protect its encryption keys for applications link; Transparent Data Encryption, Backup Encryption, and Column Level Encryption.
- How to deploy Certificates to VMs from Key Vault - A cloud application running in a VM on Azure needs a certificate. How do you get this certificate into this VM today?
- How to set up Key Vault with end to end key rotation and auditing - This walks through how to set up key rotation and auditing with Azure Key Vault.
- Deploying Azure Web App Certificate through Key Vault provides step-by-step instructions for deploying certificates stored in Key Vault as part of App Service Certificate offering.
- Grant permission to many applications to access a key vault Key Vault access control policy supports up to 1024 entries. However you can create an Azure Active Directory security group. Add all the associated service principals to this security group and then grant access to this security group to Key Vault.
- For more task-specific guidance on integrating and using Key Vaults with Azure, see Ryan Jones' Azure Resource Manager template examples for Key Vault.
- How to use Key Vault soft-delete with CLI guides you through the use and lifecycle of a key vault and various key vault objects with soft-delete enabled.
- How to use Key Vault soft-delete with PowerShell guides you through the use and lifecycle of a key vault and various key vault objects with soft-delete enabled.
Integrated with Key Vault
These articles are about other scenarios and services that use or integrate with Key Vault.
- Azure Disk Encryption leverages the industry standard BitLocker feature of Windows and the DM-Crypt feature of Linux to provide volume encryption for the OS and the data disks. The solution is integrated with Azure Key Vault to help you control and manage the disk encryption keys and secrets in your key vault subscription, while ensuring that all data in the virtual machine disks are encrypted at rest in your Azure storage.
- Azure Data Lake Store provides option for encryption of data that is stored in the account. For key management, Data Lake Store provides two modes for managing your master encryption keys (MEKs), which are required for decrypting any data that is stored in the Data Lake Store. You can either let Data Lake Store manage the MEKs for you, or choose to retain ownership of the MEKs using your Azure Key Vault account. You specify the mode of key management while creating a Data Lake Store account.
- Azure Information Protection allows you to manager your own tenant key. For example, instead of Microsoft managing your tenant key (the default), you can manage your own tenant key to comply with specific regulations that apply to your organization. Managing your own tenant key is also referred to as bring your own key, or BYOK.
Key Vault overviews and concepts
- Key Vault soft-delete behavior) describes a feature that allows recovery of deleted objects, whether the deletion was accidental or intentional.
- Key Vault client throttling orients you to the basic concepts of throttling and offers an approach for your app.
- Key Vault storage account keys overview) describes the Key Vault integration Azure Storage Accounts keys.
- Key Vault security worlds describes the relationships between regions and security areas.
Social
Api Development Best Practices
Supporting Libraries
Generating Api Keys
- Microsoft Azure Key Vault Core Library provides IKey and IKeyResolver interfaces for locating keys from identifiers and performing operations with keys.
- Microsoft Azure Key Vault Extensions provides extended capabilities for Azure Key Vault.