Azure AD as Federation Provider for Okta
We are developing an application in which we plan to use Okta as the ID provider. However, this application will be hosted in Azure and we would like to use the Azure ACS for Federation. However, off late we came to know that ACS is going be integrated with Azure AD (http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2015/02/12/the-future-of-azure-acs-is-azure-active-directory.aspx). I am bit confused here.
I understand AD provides the directory services and will be used for authentication. In our case, this will be Okta. How can I use AD (as ACS is going to be integrated with AD) for this? I tried uploading a Ws-Federation metadata for a test application from Okta to Azure ACS (tried to create a new ID provider), however I couldn't succeed in doing that. Any help will be much appreciated.
I tried using Okta APIs, and it worked well. But, the ask is to use Azure to communicate with Okta.
Answer
You can set up Okta as the IDP to Azure since you plan to leverage Okta as the directory and as the IDP. The benefit here is that you can leverage other policies and features within Okta for authorization during login time (eg. mfa).
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn641269.aspx - This page provides a pretty detailed description on how to set this up. So effective, Azure is not "directly" communicating with Okta - but rather - integrating with Okta where Azure (and your app) is the SP and Okta is the IDP.