Setting up Azure MCP with Service Principal

Today I'm going to focus on how to set up Azure MCP Server, but specifically how to use a service principal to authenticate. During my setup, and I've done this with both MacOS using npm and Windows using Docker, I really struggled to find a simple guide about how to use Azure MCP with a service principal so thought I'd document my own setup to hopefully help the community. I've also created a follow-on post detailing a real-world usage of AI to streamline an Azure environment that you can read for inspiration. Why use Azure MCP? I don't know about you, but our Azure estate is vast.