The Access Control Service, otherwise known as ACS, is officially being retired. ACS will remain available for existing customers until November 7, 2018. After this date, ACS will be shut down, causing all requests to the service to fail.
This blog post is a follow up to the initial announcement of the retirement of ACS service.
Who is affected by this change?
This retirement affects any customer who has created one or more ACS namespaces in their Azure subscriptions. For instance, this may include Service Bus customers that have created an ACS namespace indirectly when creating a Service Bus namespace. If your apps and services do not use ACS, then you have no action to take.
What action is required?
If you are using ACS, you will need a migration strategy. The correct migration path for you depends on how your existing apps and services use ACS. We have published migration guidance to assist. In most cases, migration will require code changes on your part.
If you are uncertain whether your apps and services are using ACS, you are not alone. After the retirement of ACS from the Azure portal in April 2018, you had to contact Azure support to list your namespaces. Moving forward, we are pleased to announce this will no longer be the case.
Access Control Service PowerShell now available
ACS PowerShell provides a direct replacement for the ACS functionality in the classic Azure portal. For more details, please follow the instructions to download from the PowerShell gallery.
How to list and delete your ACS namespaces
Once you have installed ACS PowerShell, you can follow these simple steps to determine and ultimately delete your ACS namespaces:
1. Connect to ACS using the Connect-AcsAccount cmdlet.
2. List your available Azure subscriptions using the Get-AcsSubscription cmdlet.
3. List your ACS namespaces using the Get-AcsNamespace cmdlet
The Azure customers most likely to find ACS namespaces signed up Azure Service Bus prior to 2014. These namespaces can be identified by their –sb extension. The Service Bus team has provided migration guidance and will continue to publish updates to their blog.
4. Disable your ACS namespace using the Disable-AcsNamespace cmdlet.
This step is optional. If you believe that you have completed migration, it is recommended that you disable your namespace prior to deletion. After being disabled, requests will receive a 404 response from https://{your-namespace}.accesscontrol.windows.net. The namespace is otherwise untouched and can be restored using the Enable-AcsNamespace cmdlet.
5. Delete your ACS namespace using the Remove-AcsNamespace cmdlet.
This step will permanently remove your namespace and is not recoverable.
Contact us
For more information about the retirement of ACS, please check our ACS migration guidance first. If none of the migration options will work for you, or if you still have questions or feedback about ACS retirement, please contact us at acsfeedback@microsoft.com.