If you’ve been working with Azure for a while you may have come across a need to make use of Azure’s Access Control Services. This service offering or capability effectively allowed developers to create something that was hosted on Azure but have authentication and authorization to be completed performed outside of the application that a developer was building.
In many cases, developers that were looking to integrate with services like Facebook, Twitter, or another Active Directory would make use of ACS to handle the authentication and authorization and allow the developer to focus on what they were developing within their App. This was great in that it was effectively performing a lot of heavy lifting without a lot of code.
As Azure is continuing to evolve, change happens and in this case we see Access Control Services entering a deprecated state where it will no longer be support as of November 7, 2018. What’s all this mean to you? Perhaps nothing if you’re not using ACS. If you are however using ACS, it’s still fully operational, but similar to the Death Star, in the near future it will cease to exist.
More about this activity is available here on the Microsoft Azure Blog – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/time-to-migrate-off-access-control-service/
If however you say to yourself, “I’ve been using ACS for a while and my app relies upon it heavily…” Fear not, there’s a published migration path that you can make use of… you can check it out here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-acs-migration
Nonetheless, consider yourself informed when you’re working with a client or with your fellow developers that you’ll need to consider how to begin building a transition plan to make use of something like Azure Active Directory or another offering of Azure’s per the migration guidance aforementioned. Happy developing!
The Tech Blog of Dan Usher 