Data Factory supports service principal and MSI authentication for Azure Blob connectors
Published date: August 22, 2018
Azure Data Factory now supports service principal and managed service identity (MSI) authentication for Azure Blob storage, in addition to the Shared Key and SAS token authentications. You can use these new authentication types, for example, when copying data from/to Blob storage, or when you're looking up/getting metadata from Blob storage. Learn more from Azure Storage Azure Active Directory authentication overview and Azure Data Factory configurations and prerequisites.
Note that Data Factory has introduced a new linked service type, “AzureBlobStorage,” which supports these new features. If you're running with the “AzureStorage” type linked service, it will still be supported as is. To use the new authentication types or to develop new workloads, please create a linked service with the new type. The Data Factory authoring UI starts to generate the “AzureBlobStorage” type for new creations.
For hybrid operations using self-hosted integration runtime, this feature is supported since version 3.9 (July release).