Windows Azure - Get Access Keys For Azure Storage Account

Introduction:

In this article we are going to see how to fetch the Access Keys of an Azure Storage Account using the Windows Azure Management Portal.

Overview:

Access Keys are used as an authentication mode for accessing the storage services account to manipulate information based on our requirements. In Windows Azure we have an option to provide a Primary Access Key and  a Secondary Access Key, even though we will use a single access key to authenticate our application to the storage. The main reason to provide the secondary access key is to avoid downtime to the application. If we need to change the application access key by regenerating the access key it takes quite some time to take effect; this provides a downtime. 

To avoid this type of situation, a secondary access key is provided so that if the primary needs to be changed or regenerated we can map the secondary temporarily to the storage and regenerate the primary. Let us see step by step of how to get the Access Keys using Windows Azure Management Portal.

Steps:

Login to the Management Portal using the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

We will see a screen like below. Select the Sign into Management Portal at the top right corner.



After selecting that sign in to Management Portal you will be asked for the Username and Password to authenticate the process as shown in the following screen:


 
After providing the correct credentials and clicking the submit button it will navigate to the main screen of the portal as shown in the following screen:

 
Now click on the Hosted Services, Storage Account and CDN option in the bottom menu and then select the Hosted Services as shown in the screen below.
 

 

Now click on the Storage Accounts Menu; we will see the storage account created and we will see the Primary and Secondary Access Keys at the Right side menu as shown in the screen below.

 
Clicking on the View button will open the Primary Access key and the Secondary Access key as shown in the screen below.

 
We can copy the access key by clicking on the Copy to Clipboard to use it across our application for authentication as shown in the screen below.

Conclusion:

So in this article we have seen how to get the Access Keys for the storage account to use it across our application as authentication for the storage methods.