1Password service accounts, SDKs and Environments MCP vs Azure Key Vault

1Password service accounts, SDKs and Environments MCP

Service accounts scoped per vault to read, write or share, with an optional expiry and permissions that can't be changed after creation. Teams, Families and Individual get 1,000 service account reads an hour per token, and the 429 carries no Retry-After.

Azure Key Vault

Access runs on Microsoft Entra ID tokens and Azure roles that can be scoped to one secret, with soft delete, a 99.99 per cent SLA and a public OpenAPI contract. Secret rotation needs an Event Grid trigger and a function the owner writes, audit logging is off until enabled, and an Azure subscription needs a person and a payment card.

1Password service accounts, SDKs and Environments MCP

1. Read secrets by reference (op://vault/item/field) with client.secrets.resolve or resolveAll, and keep the reference, not the value, in config
2. On Teams or personal plans budget for 1,000 reads an hour per token and cache resolved values for the run; a 429 means wait for the hourly window, there's no Retry-After
3. Create the service account with only read_items on one vault and --expires-in set to the job length, since permissions can't be narrowed later
4. Set integrationName and integrationVersion in createClient so the usage report shows which agent read what
5. Don't ask the Environments MCP server for a value. Use it to find the variable name, then load it with op run or the SDK

Azure Key Vault

1. Request a token for the resource https://vault.azure.net and send it as a Bearer header. Every call must carry api-version, such as 2025-07-01, because there is no default
2. Ask for the Key Vault Secrets User role on the vault or the single secret. Key Vault Reader returns metadata only, not values
3. Cache secret values in memory. A vault allows 4,000 reads and 300 secret creations per 10 seconds, and a subscription five times that
4. On 429 wait 1, 2, 4, 8 then 16 seconds. Throttled requests do not count against the limit
5. Don't retry Set Secret blindly. Each successful call creates a new version of the secret