Jun 28, 2016

Microsoft Azure offers both graphical and command line interfaces for managing your online subscriptions. If you want to automate certain actions, then using PowerShell you can create reusable scripts.

Windows PowerShell is the scripting platform used in Windows Operating Systems. Azure PowerShell offers a set of commands to manage your Azure subscription using Windows PowerShell. You can download Azure PowerShell from here. Azure PowerShell offers a core set of commands for managing the services, resource groups and for managing authentication.

In order to use Azure PowerShell commands, you need to start the Windows PowerShell as administrator. Then you need to connect your account and subscription to the local PowerShell environment.

Once you have done that, you can execute a series of commands to manage Microsoft Azure.

You can also download the Azure cross platform command line interface to work with your Azure subscription. You can run Azure cross platform commands to manage websites, virtual machines, mobile services, SQL database and other services. You can download Azure cross platform commands line interface from here.

After you have installed, you must sign in to your subscription by using azure account download command. A web browser opens and prompts you to download the publish settings file. This file has a .publishsettings extension. Then run the azure account import [path to the publish settings file] to be able to run azure commands from the Windows PowerShell CLI.

If you are a developer, you can also download the Azure SDK. Azure SDK for .NET offers a set of tools, command line tools, binaries to deploy apps for Microsoft Azure.