An Azure Service Connection is the connection between Azure DevOps and your Azure subscription. It allows Azure DevOps to authenticate and interact with Azure resources and external resources on your behalf.
When you create a service connection in Azure DevOps, you will give it a name. This is the name that you would use in a web app deployments ‘azureSubscription’ input if, for example, you are using it to deploy to an Azure App Service. In that case you would create a service connection of type ‘Azure Resource Manager’.
There are many other external services that you might need to create a service connection for, however. A few examples include:
- Docker Registry: If you need to connect to Docker registries like Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry, or any other custom Docker registry
- GitHub: To connect to a GitHub repository. This can be used to trigger builds when changes are pushed to GitHub.
- Kubernetes
- npm
- NuGet
- Etc…