Purpose of Azure Management Certificates

Question

I'm doing some testing with a new Cloud Service and for some reason in my certificates I'm getting a bunch of these entries

DC=Windows Azure Service Management for Extensions

All have different thumbprints. Doesn't seem to be affecting anything.. but annoying to have in the list.

What are they? How do I stop them from auto populating?

Answer 1

The things you could do through Azure Management Portal (like creating Cloud Services etc.) can essentially be done through Azure Service Management API. Management certificates are one way of authenticating your Service Management API requests: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/ee460782.aspx#bk_cert.

There are many reasons that these certificates are created automatically. Some of them are:

• Whenever you download a publish setting file, a new management certificate is created.
• If you try to connect to your cloud service VM via RDP through portal, if you don't pay attention, a new certificate is created for RDP. I'm not 100% sure but same thing happens when you update Azure Diagnostics as diagnostics is again an extension.