Microsoft is the backbone of the enterprise, and constantly reminds us of how ephemeral technical knowledge is.

Throughout history, we’ve watched as the old ways get left behind and the new ways take hold. Safeguards are put in place to improve stability, quality of life, and empowerment of the common man. From empires to software, there paradigm shifts come and can significantly affect our daily life.

Rome built a massive infrastructure and laid the foundation of western culture and Christian ethics. Social media sites allow contact with people across the globe at your fingertips. Proper Cloud computing eliminates technical debt and turns CapEx into OpEx, allowing for more realistic budgets and department chargeback.

Sometimes, these systems become bloated and rot from within. Rome splits in half and decays over the next few centuries. Social media monetized engagement and grew into an echo chamber that polarizes and corrupts. Developers will chuck a server into the cloud without optimizing their app making it cost MORE money than running on-prem. And the most egregious offender: Microsoft is renaming one of their products. Again.

The Death of Azure Active Directory and Common Sense

While most of you may have been aware of Microsoft Entra for a while, it is going to replace Azure Active Directory. Because why tie your cloud-based Identity Access Service with the well-known and commonly used on-prem IAC?

The reason sysadmins love Azure is that it’s intuitive to people who deal with infrastructure. When you want to configure DNS, in AWS you go to ‘Route 53’. This is a reference to the port name. In Azure, it’s ‘Azure DNS’. When you spin up a basic computer, AWS has ‘EC2’ (Elastic Compute) and Azure has ‘B1’ (Basic 1).

Now, Microsoft is replacing Azure Active Directory with Microsoft Entra. Because things that make no sense seem to keep developers happy. The only remote benefit I can see is that this will make searching documentation easier since AD and AAD tend to get the same results.

Regardless of how much or little we seethe over changes to the cloud; our unifying force remains the same. We can script to keep working as we always did and let the GUI guys figure it out. Changes every few weeks are in the nature of the beast of IT.

The Big Changes from Microsoft

The Workaround

If you are confused when the changes hit, you can pull the SKUs. The ObjectID of each SKU shouldn’t change.

To find all licenses on one user:

Get-AzureADUserLicenseDetail $ObjectID | fl

To find all licenses used in your current directory:

Get-AzureADSubscribedSKU

If you are applying licenses by name with a script, use the ObjectID of the SKU. Using IDs for everything will help future-proof for when Microsoft inevitably changes the ‘Hybrid Automation Workers’ to ‘Microsoft Semi Auxilium’ and ‘Azure DNS’ becomes ‘Microsoft Dynamica’.