Introduction:
In this article we are going to see how fetch the Access Keys of an Azure Storage Account using the Windows Azure Management Portal.
Overview:
Access Keys are used as a authentication mode for accessing the storage services account to manipulate some information based on our requirement. In Windows Azure we have option to provide a Primary Access Key and a Secondary Access Key, even though we will use a single access key to authenticate our application to the storage the main reason to provide the secondary access key is to avoid downtime to the application. If we need to change the application access key by regenerating the access key it takes quite some time take effect this provides a downtime.
[more]To avoid this type of situation, a secondary access key is provided so that if primary needs to be changes or regenerated we can map the secondary temporarily to the storage and regenerate the primary. Let us see the step by step on how to get the Access Keys using Windows Azure Management Portal.
Steps:
Login to the management portal using the below link
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
We can see a screen like below. Select the Sign into Management portal at the top right corner
After selecting that sign in to management portal you will be asked for the Username and Password to authenticate the process as shown in the below screen
Once we gave the correct credentials and click on submit button will navigate to the main screen of the portal as shown in the below screen
Now click on the Hosted Services, Storage Account and CDN option in the bottom menu and then select the Hosted Services as shown in the screen below.
Now click on the Storage Accounts Menu, we can see the storage account created and we can see the Primary and Secondary Access Keys at the Right side menu as shown in the screen below.
Clicking on the View button will open the Primary Access key and the Secondary Access key as shown in the screen below.
We can copy the access key by clicking on the Copy to Clipboard to use it across our application for authentication as shown in the screen below.
Conclusion:
So in this article we have seen how to Get the Access Keys for the storage account to use it across our application as authentication for the storage methods.
