3 years ago

Category: Data

There is an undocumented way to reference Azure Key Vault secrets even when the UI doesn’t support it. In a recent project we created a number of Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines which we needed to push through Dev / Test / Prod environments in a typical devops flow. Whilst this is pretty well documented, in practice there were a couple of things we lacked. For instance, when connecting to Azure Databricks the UI wizard allows you to specify a key vault secret instead of hard-coding the PAT token you need to authenticate. This is great as it means in each environment (dev/test/prod) we have a key vault with the same secret name which stores the appropriate PAT token: However, we also wanted to dynamically populate the instance pool id from key vault too — but no luck in the UI: Fortunately, using the code view it’s possible to specify a key vault secret which the UI doesn’t allow.