Windows Azure - Add New Certificate to Azure Application

Article

Introduction:

In this article we are going to see how to add a new certificate to an Azure application starting with the deployment of the Azure application to the Azure Management Portal.

Overview:

Adding a certificate to an Azure application is something which requires a basic understanding of what a certificate is and what types of certificates are available (check my previous article on Overview of Certificates in Azure). Once we are confident of what certificates are and which type of certificate to use we are well set to start with the process of adding the certificate to the cloud application. In our sample we will see how to add a Service Certificate to an Azure application. Let's jump-start to see the steps for how to create and configure a certificate in Azure Management Portal.

Steps:

First we will create a new Cloud application (Azure application) with a web role and an ASP.Net project as shown in the screen below (check my earlier article on How to create this application Step by step.

Now right-click on the Azure Application and select the Publish option as shown in the screen below:

Here this is an important step to select the option for deploying the application to the cloud. We have 2 options here; either to do a direct deploy or to prepare a service configuration file to do a manual deploy.

Since in our sample we are going to add a new certificate we will select "Deploy your Windows Azure Project to Windows Azure" as shown in the screen below and select the drop down box Credentials and select ADD as shown below.

Here we are going to do some manual configurations to create a certificate for authentication purposes. So select the first drop down box as highlighted in the screen below.

We can see a list of Certificates available, may be in your system there will not be any certificates if none have been created. Now select the Create option to create a new application certificate as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on Create will pop up a window asking for some friendly name for the certificate for use as identification if we need to create with more than 1 certificate as shown in the screen below:

Once we give the certificate a friendly name, click the OK button to go back to the previous screen where we need to see the option no 2 as highlighted in the screen below. Copy the full path option will allow us to copy the location of the certificate to use it across the places required. So Click on that link button as shown in the screen below:

Now we willsee a pop up indicating that the Certificate path details are copied to the windows clipboard; to use it across as shown in the screen below:

Now click on the option 2 link Windows Azure Portal or we can directly go to www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
to open the Azure Management Portal as shown in the screen below:

Provide the credentials for the Azure portal and we can see the screen as shown below:

Now click on Hosted services, Storage Accounts and CDN as shown in the screen below and we can see Hosted Services Menu at the left side. Click on that to open the list of applications hosted as shown in the screen below.

Now select the application where we need to add the certificate and click on the Add Certificate option as shown in the screen below:

We will see a pop-up window asking for some inputs of the certificate as shown below. Now click the browse button as shown in the screen below:

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Now Paste the path we copied initially of where the certificate is located in the browse option as shown in the screen below and click on open:

Now the certificate file is added and there will be an option to enter a password; we can create our own password for authentication as shown in the screen below and click the Create button:

Now we can see a new Certificate is added to the hosted service as highlighted in the screen below, which indicates that a new certificate has been created and added to the application.