Today I'm going to focus on how to set up Azure MCP Server, but more specifically how to use a service principal to authenticate. During my setup, and I've done this with both MacOS using npm and Windows using Docker, I really struggled to find a simple guide about how to use Azure MCP with a service principal so thought I'd document my own setup to hopefully help the community.
I've also created a follow-on post detailing a real-world usage of AI to streamline an Azure environment that you can read for inspiration.
Why use Azure MCP?
I don't know about you, but our Azure estate is vast. In fact it doesn't take long for an Azure estate to become difficult to analyse, in my opinion. Yes there's Azure Advisor, but that takes time and sometimes feels like a bit of an upsell - yes I'm aware my VMs are running as B-series SKUs, I did that for a reason! We're seeing all these articles and buzz about speeding up app development using MCP, and for good reason, but what about Infrastructure?
Potential uses for Azure MCP
