Azure Cloud Shell
At the recent Build Developer Summit, Microsoft announced a very exciting and new utility feature for the Azure portal. Cloud Shell is a online Full bash shell built on the web portal to manage your azure subscription. It is very useful as previously we need to setup the environment in our local systems with tools like Azure CLI, Azure CLI 2.0,Powershell etc but this eliminates the hassle of setting up the environment and you can work with any system from anywhere on the world.
The Azure Cloud Shell will give you the logged in session so you don’t have to additionally login and get the context of your subscription instead it will share the session details with the browser login into the portal. The sessions in the azure cloud shell is not persistent and you will lose the context once you logout so when you login again your previous session commands will not be available there.
As you can see in the screenshot above, we need to create a storage account and use the File Share for a persistent $Home Directory. It is going to use the File share as our Hard disk and use the same storage account for each subscription. It’s a one time activity, once setup the cloud shell will use the the storage accounts File share automatically. It will be useful to work with the BASH on the cloud shell.
Azure Shell right now supports Azure CLI 2.0, if you’re not familiar with the recently public previewed azure CLI 2.0 then you can go through my articles here. As powershell is the majorly used scripting language to manage the azure resources, Microsoft is working to bring the powershell to the azure portal and once done you can directly run your scripts from the azure portal.
We ran the Az VM list command and we got the output like we get in the command line on our system.
One of the most amazing announcement that excited me personally was the launch of the Azure Mobile app which means you can manage your resources from a mobile application on the go. The Azure portal was not mobile friendly and everytime I needed to login to my system to manage my resources but this will make my resources accessibility much easier. And the best part is even the mobile app will support the azure cloud shell so you can run your commands and scripts directly from your mobile. As of now, it gives the coming soon dialog
Summary
With the new Azure Cloud Shell on the portal we can run Azure CLI 2.0 and powershell is going to be supported as well soon. This console is only working in the web portal but its going to be working in the azure mobile app for IOS and Android Soon.