The Azure Portal has just received an interesting new feature here at Build 2017. Microsoft has announced that the central dashboard for managing all applications that run on the Azure platform is receiving a full Bash shell that will support the company’s very own PowerShell as well.
PowerShell support isn’t quite here yet, but expect it to follow soon after. You can also access the Azure Cloud Shell through the mobile applications. Microsoft first announced this particular shell into cloud integration last December. While announcing it, the company had said:
The shell is integrated into the portal so users can quickly drop into a command line experience while simultaneously viewing their cloud resources in the graphical web interface.
Some of the prominent features of this shell are as follows:
- Automatic authentication to the command line tools from your existing web login
- All Azure command line tools, as well as relevant command line utilities pre-installed
- Personalized, persistent workspace that preserves your code, configuration and activity across cloud shell sessions.
So basically, cloud shell sessions are persistent. On the other hand, Azure command line sessions are pre-installed. These sessions are also synced to a $Home directory. The syncing process is automatic and this directory allows you to save scripts and files for use later. This enhances the capabilities of the Azure portal as well as the Docker command line tool. You could use the latter for instance, to kick off containers.
The feature has been made available to all Azure Cloud users, starting now.
