The Azure Python SDK generates a new authentication token with every API request. As each SDK API interaction consists of two requests, new auth token generation and the original request, this more than doubles the API round trip time (rtt). These additional tokens are also undesirable, as they both pollute logfiles and expose the Azure subscriber to a larger surface area for brute force attacks.

The Python SDK should store and reuse existing auth token(s) to address these concerns. An example implementation would be to store the auth token within the class and renew it on authentication failure (return code 401).

Below is an example of multiple token generation while the Python SDK polls until a VM (sqa01) is deallocated,

>>> azure.vm_deallocate_wait('sqa01')
2018-08-23 15:43:09,509 INFO Attempting to deallocate resource group sqa vm sqa01
2018-08-23 15:43:09,510 INFO 6fb1f37a-4dc9-4462-8457-4cc5e66029ab - TokenRequest:Getting token with client credentials.
2018-08-23 15:43:10,022 INFO Waiting for vm_deallocate to complete
2018-08-23 15:43:20,032 INFO 817fb915-3213-41ed-996a-acf204335e2f - TokenRequest:Getting token with client credentials.
2018-08-23 15:43:56,283 INFO 81be0aa3-ce8e-442f-8572-b513b6d1ce37 - TokenRequest:Getting token with client credentials.
2018-08-23 15:44:26,530 INFO 7e9eb2d7-ee66-4b88-84ce-502d5ec396ab - TokenRequest:Getting token with client credentials.
2018-08-23 15:44:57,178 INFO 858dbefb-2565-43ce-a716-67e89740654a - TokenRequest:Getting token with client credentials.
2018-08-23 15:45:29,542 INFO 99b18ddd-5741-47cc-a259-ce3bc0b96624 - TokenRequest:Getting token with client credentials.
2018-08-23 15:45:29,827 INFO vm_deallocate returned a successful response