Azure – Introduction to Azure Cloud Shell – support to various tools including Python

Hi All,

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Today, in this article we will discuss most powerful Azure resource management tool – Azure Cloud Shell. Very important to know each IT person who works on Azure 🙂

Take away from this article :

• Understand what is – Azure Cloud Shell ?
• How to start Azure Cloud Shell and execute the commands
• Various tools supported by Azure Cloud Shell

What is Azure Cloud Shell?

• Azure cloud shell enables us to manage Azure resources, execute the scripts directly from the browser
• Azure cloud shell allows us to use both following prompts in browser
  • Bash
  • PowerShell
• Azure Cloud Shell offers a browser-accessible, pre-configured shell experience for managing Azure resources without the overhead of installing, versioning, and maintaining a machine yourself.

Opening Azure Cloud Shell in Azure Portal:

• Login to Azure Portal
• We have icon “Cloud Shell” at top right corner as shown in below Fig

• Once we clicked on “Azure Cloud Shell” icon, we will have an option to select the prompt either “Bash” OR “PowerShell” as shown in below Fig

• Azure Cloud Shell requires Azure Subscription. If we don’t have Azure Subscription we will get following message as

• Once we logged in with our subscription account, next step will be storage (Azure file share) required to store the files
• If we don’t have storage mounted then we will get an message “You have no storage mounted” as shown in below Fig

• We will have “Create storage” option available as shown in above Fig
• Creating a storage requires cost, make sure we went through the pricing details before creating any storage
• Actual require cost is very minimal 🙂
• Once we are ready with Storage, Azure Cloud Shell gets ready as shown in below Fig

• In Azure Cloud Shell, in place of PowerShell if we need to use Azure CLI then just type “az” and we could then user Azure CLI in place of PowerShell

Opening Azure Cloud Shell Standalone :

• We could directly open Azure Cloud Shell by opening URL – https://shell.azure.com/.
• This will redirect to the URL https://portal.azure.com/#cloudshell/ it looks like as shown in below figure
• Important point here is , when we open standalone in browser we don’t have Azure Portal interface components

More Details :

• Session time out for Azure Cloud Shell is 20 Minutes. If we are inactive for 20 Minutes in Azure Cloud Shell, session get expired, we need to connect again
• As we discussed above, Azure Cloud Shell requires an Azure file share to be mounted
• Azure Cloud Shell securely and automatically authenticates account access for the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell.
• Azure Cloud Shell comes with lots of inbuilt tools including
  • Azure Tools => Azure CLI and Azure classic CLI, AzCopy, Azure Functions CLI, Service Fabric CLI, Batch Shipyard, blobxfer
  • Linux Tools => bash, zsh, sh, tmux, dig
  • Text editors => code (Cloud Shell editor), vim, nano, emacs
  • Source Control => git
  • Build Tools => make, maven, npm, pip
  • Containers => Docker Machine, Kubectl, Helm, DC/OS CLI
  • Databases => MySQL client, PostgreSql client, sqlcmd Utility, mssql-scripter
  • Others => iPython Client, Cloud Foundry CLI, Terraform, Ansible, Chef InSpec, Puppet, Bolt, HashiCorp Packer, Office 365 CLI

Support to Python :

• The Azure Cloud shell includes several inbuilt tools to use among these tools includes my most favorite Python.
• We need to simply use the command python executable
• Then we could start executing Python scripts directly within the Azure Cloud Shell.
• Anyway we always install and use Python locally, but the Azure Cloud Shell offers an environment that can be used from any where regardless of local installation of tooling.
• I’ll cover more in depth on this in next upcoming articles 🙂

References:

• Pricing details for Storage / Azure Files

Thanks for reading 🙂 Feel free to discuss / comments / questions 🙂 SHARING IS CARING 🙂

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