Azure Tools - Azure SAS Generator

I decided to start a new series of articles about tools that can be used by Developers to improve their experience with Microsoft Azure. Each week I will publish a post related to a tool. The main focus is on tools that are free of charge, but sometimes I might include paid one.

Context: Having discussions with various technical people, especially from the development area, I realize that the tools that they are aware of are limited. There are so many tools that can improve our experience when we work with Microsoft Azure. Even so, many times we rely only on a few of them.

Highlights of Azure SAS Generator

Azure Services: Azure Storage (blobs, tables and queues)

Cost: free of use

How is delivered: Native Windows application

Top 3 features:

#1 SAS key generator
#2 Works offline
#3 Update the SAS key dynamically when you change an attribute

Pain points:

#1 Sometimes freeze and does not generate the keys
#2 Cannot add accounts using your Azure account
#3 Does not load the resources dynamically from the account storage

Download URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/azure-sas-generator/9wzdncrdlv09

Credits: Jeffrey M Richter (https://twitter.com/jeffrichter)

Today I will start with Azure SAS Generator, that enables us to generate Shared Access Signatures (SAS) for Azure Storage. Using this tool you can generate SAS for Containers, Blobs, Tables and Queues.

What I like about these tools is the way how the SAS is generated. Each time when you change an attribute to the key it automatically updates the generated key. Clean and easy to use, it is the kind of tool that I highly recommend when you want to learn how a SAS is generated, what does it contain and the attributes of the key. You have the ability to specify the version of SAS key you want to use. Even so in general, we use the latest one, but there might be situations when you want to use older versions.

The tool is not perfect, sometimes you might find out that the key is not generated. In these situations change the Resource Type from Blob to Tables and back to Blob. This actions should fix the problem. Adding new storage accounts can be done only using the account name and key. You might prefer to log in using your account credentials, but at least, in this case, you know all the time what account key it is used to generate the SAS key.

TIP: SAS keys are generated using the account key. When you regenerate the account key all the SAS keys generated using that account key will be invalidated.

The application can be used to generate SAS keys in offline mode, because generating this kind of access keys does not require to make a call to Azure Storage - they just required the account key to generate the signature of the SAS – “sig”

There is a strange name in the interface used for one of the properties of the SAS key - “Signature identifier”. It represents the SAS policy in the case when you want to use one. The app is not able to load the SAS policies that exist for a specific account, but you can specify it.

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