Azure Automation support for System Assigned Managed Identities is now in public preview

Azure Automation now supports System Assigned Managed Identities for cloud and Hybrid jobs in Azure public and Gov regions. Hybrid jobs could be running on an Hybrid runbook worker running on an Azure or non-Azure VM.

A managed identity from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) allows your runbook to easily access other Azure AD-protected resources. The identity is managed by the Azure platform and users don’t have to manage service principals on their own.

 Some of the benefits of using managed identities:

• You can use managed identities to authenticate to any Azure service that supports Azure AD authentication.
• Managed identities eliminate the management overhead associated with managing RunAs Account in your runbook code. The end user can access resources via a managed identity of an Automation account from a runbook without worrying about creating the service principal, RunAsCertificate, RunAsConnection, etc.
• You don’t have to renew the certificate used by the Automation Run As account.

 Learn more about Automation Managed Identities support.