Extended Guide
SCEPman Enterprise Edition only
This will guide you through all steps to deploy SCEPman for an enterprise-grade environment with advanced requirements, e.g. naming conventions, redundancy or auto-scaling.
Azure Deployment
Let's start with the requirements and a resource overview. Keep in mind that you need to plan a useful Azure resource design.
Prerequisites
Mandatory
Optional
Overview Azure Resource
All these resources are recommended for a production environment.
App Service(s)
A virtual Azure environment to run the SCEPman Core and Cert Master applications and provides a UI to configure different application specific settings like CNAME, SSL certificate and App Settings.
App Service Plan
A virtual set of compute resources and configurations for the "App Service(s)".
Here you can configure the pricing tier and resource scaling.
Key Vault
Tool to securely store secrets and certificates. The SCEPman application
will generate and save the root certificate in your Key Vault.
Application Insights
Application Performance Management (APM) tool to get insights of the
SCEPman applications and requests. Needed to measure performance
and good for service optimization.
Storage account
Storage platform used by SCEPman's Certificate Master component to store certain attributes of the manually issued TLS server certificates for revocation purposes. Optional:
The "App Service" will load the artifacts from a blob storage URI if manual updates are configured.
Log Analytics workspace
A centralized and cloud-based log storage. The "App Service" will save all
platform logs and metrics into this workspace.
Additionally, if you are using Private Endpoints, you have seven more Azure Resources.
Configuration Steps
Step 1: Deploy SCEPman Base Services
This is a mandatory step.
To start with the deployment, you need to follow our setup instructions leveraging an ARM Template
or alternatively our Terraform script:
Step 2: Perform Post-Deployment Steps (Permission Assignments)
This is a mandatory step.
To properly link all components of SCEPman 2.X, several permissions need to be assigned. Please follow these steps to establish the relevant connections:
Step 3: Create Root Certificate
This is a mandatory step.
After the deployment and persmission assignment is complete, you need to create the root certificate for SCEPman:
Step 4: Configure a Custom Domain and SSL Certificate
This is a recommended step. However, skip this step if you are implementing geo-redundancy / high-availability.
To have your SCEPman available under your specific domain you need to create a Custom Domain in the App Service.
Step 5: Manual Updates
By default, SCEPman's update strategy is configured to the Evergreen approach / auto-updates. In case you require full control over your SCEPman updates, please configure a deployment slot as described in the following guide under section Deployment Slot Configuration.
Step 6: Deploy Application Insights
This is recommended step.
The Application Insights can be used to get an overview of the App Service performance and to get deeper insights of the request processing of SCEPman. We recommend to always configure Application Insights to monitor, maintain and optimize the App Service.
Step 7: Configure Health Check
This is recommended step.
We can configure a Health Check for the App Service to get direct notifications in case that the SCEPman stops working.
Step 8: Ensure that SCEPman has sufficient Resources
This is a mandatory step.
Once you move SCEPman into a production environment, you should ensure that SCEPman is equipped with sufficient computing power. Therefore, please review our Azure Sizing guide and upgrade your App Service Plan tier if need be. You may postpone this until after your PoC or trial phase.
Step 9: Configure Autoscaling
The SCEPman solution has two different tasks and performance requirements. One task is the certificate issuance process: After the configuration of the SCEPman solution we need to deploy certificates to all devices (user and/or device certificates), but this is a one-time-task and after the initial deployment this only happens when a new device is enrolled, or the certificates needs to be renewed. In those situations, the SCEPman will face a peek of SCEP requests. The second task is the certificate validation: After we deployed certificates to devices, those certificates need to be validated each time we use them. For every certificated-based authentication the clients, gateways, or RADIUS system (depends on what you use) will send an OCSP request to the SCEPman App Service. This will cause a permanent request load on the App Service.
To have an optimized performance and take care of the costs we recommend to setup the Autoscaling functionality of the App Service. With this feature your application can scale-out and scale-in based on metrics.
Step 10: Configure Geo-Redundancy
Step 11: Configure your MDM Deployment Profiles
This is a mandatory step.
With the completion of the above steps, we have a working SCEPman implementation and can now deploy certificates to the devices.
Please use one (or more) of the following articles, to deploy certificates with your preferred MDM solution:
Step 12: Issue TLS Server Certificates or sign CSRs using Cert Master
Please follow below link, to learn how to issue TLS server certificates based on a list of FQDNs or sign any CSR using the Cert Master component.
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