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7 month retirement notice: Access Control Service

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.

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 our original blog post announcing ACS retirement.

Classic Azure Portal retired April 2018

As of April 2nd 2018, the classic Azure Portal located at https://manage.windowsazure.com will be completely retired, and all requests will be redirected to the new Azure Portal at https://portal.azure.com. ACS namespaces will not be listed in the new Azure Portal whatsoever.  If you need to create, delete, enable, or disable an ACS namespace going forward, please contact Azure support. Starting from May 1 you will not be able to create new ACS namespaces.

You can still manage existing namespace configurations by visiting the ACS management portal directly, located at https://{your-namespace}.accesscontrol.windows.net. This portal allows you to manage service identities, relying parties, identity providers, claims rules, and more. It will be available until November 7, 2018.

Who is affected by this change?

This announcement affects any customer who has created one or more ACS namespaces in their Azure subscriptions. If your apps and services do not use Access Control Service, then you have no action to take.

To determine if your apps and services use ACS, you should monitor for any traffic to https://{your-namespace}.accesscontrol.windows.net. All traffic to ACS is sent to the accesscontrol.windows.net domain.

Note: Any traffic to the https://accounts.accesscontrol.windows.net domain is already handled by a different service. Traffic to this specific domain will not be affected by ACS retirement.

What action is required?

If you use ACS in some capacity, you should immediately begin your migration strategy. In the majority of cases, migration will require significant code changes on your part.

What is the migration path?

The correct migration path for you depends heavily on how your existing apps and services use ACS. To assist in determining the right technology to use, we have published this ACS migration guidance.

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.