Software

Last year I wrote a tool to keep a server having dynamic IP-address updated into Rackspace DNS (that's free-of-charge!). See the article DynDNS updates to your Cloud DNS for details. Since the software is running in "production", I've been maintaining the thing. Production is in quotes, becuse it's not a real production-production thing. It's just something I run to make my life easier.

For a while, I've been running Azure DNS -provider and now I published the code at project's Github repo: https://github.com/HQJaTu/cloud-dyndns

Since Azure doesn't have API-keys, you need to use a service principal. Grasping the concept of service principal is tricky. For example Azure official documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/app-objects-and-service-principals fails explaining it. My own explanation for a service principal is: it is a machine user account. Yes, you can limit regular users' access in Azure, but with a service principal it is even easier. Also, a service principal cannot have 2-factor authentiation enabled for it. That's why I consider it as a machine user.

Additional:
Given the requirements, I added --ip-address-detect-public command-line argument to skip reading server's current IP-address, but probing outside world for it. The exact service is https://ipinfo.io/. Having this feature a DNS can be updated with a static IP, detected IP or probed IP. Nice!