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Managing Storage in the Azure independent clouds using PowerShell

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Most people use Azure Public Cloud for their global Azure deployment. There are also some independent deployments of Microsoft Azure for reasons of sovereignty and so on. These independent deployments are referred to as "environments." The following list details the independent clouds currently available.

Note

We recommend that you use the Azure Az PowerShell module to interact with Azure. See Install Azure PowerShell to get started. To learn how to migrate to the Az PowerShell module, see Migrate Azure PowerShell from AzureRM to Az.

Using an independent cloud

To use Azure Storage in one of the independent clouds, you connect to that cloud instead of Azure Public. To use one of the independent clouds rather than Azure Public:

  • You specify the environment to which to connect.
  • You determine and use the available regions.
  • You use the correct endpoint suffix, which is different from Azure Public.

The examples require Azure PowerShell module Az version 0.7 or later. In a PowerShell window, run Get-Module -ListAvailable Az to find the version. If nothing is listed, or you need to upgrade, see Install Azure PowerShell module.

Log in to Azure

Run the Get-AzEnvironment cmdlet to see the available Azure environments:

Get-AzEnvironment

Sign in to your account that has access to the cloud to which you want to connect and set the environment. This example shows how to sign into an account that uses the Azure Government Cloud.

Connect-AzAccount -Environment AzureUSGovernment

To access the China Cloud, use the environment AzureChinaCloud. To access the German Cloud, use AzureGermanCloud.

At this point, if you need the list of locations to create a storage account or another resource, you can query the locations available for the selected cloud using Get-AzLocation.

Get-AzLocation | select Location, DisplayName

The following table shows the locations returned for the German cloud.

Location Display Name
germanycentral Germany Central
germanynortheast Germany Northeast

Endpoint suffix

The endpoint suffix for each of these environments is different from the Azure Public endpoint. For example, the blob endpoint suffix for Azure Public is blob.core.windows.net. For the Government Cloud, the blob endpoint suffix is blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net.

Get endpoint using Get-AzEnvironment

Retrieve the endpoint suffix using Get-AzEnvironment. The endpoint is the StorageEndpointSuffix property of the environment.

The following code snippets show how to retrieve the endpoint suffix. All of these commands return something like "core.cloudapp.net" or "core.cloudapi.de", etc. Append the suffix to the storage service to access that service. For example, "queue.core.cloudapi.de" will access the queue service in German Cloud.

This code snippet retrieves all of the environments and the endpoint suffix for each one.

Get-AzEnvironment | select Name, StorageEndpointSuffix

This command returns the following results.

Name StorageEndpointSuffix
AzureChinaCloud core.chinacloudapi.cn
AzureCloud core.windows.net
AzureGermanCloud core.cloudapi.de
AzureUSGovernment core.usgovcloudapi.net

To retrieve all of the properties for the specified environment, call Get-AzEnvironment and specify the cloud name. This code snippet returns a list of properties; look for StorageEndpointSuffix in the list. The following example is for the German Cloud.

Get-AzEnvironment -Name AzureGermanCloud

The results are similar to the following values:

Property Name Value
Name AzureGermanCloud
EnableAdfsAuthentication False
ActiveDirectoryServiceEndpointResourceI http://management.core.cloudapi.de/
GalleryURL https://gallery.cloudapi.de/
ManagementPortalUrl https://portal.microsoftazure.de/
ServiceManagementUrl https://manage.core.cloudapi.de/
PublishSettingsFileUrl https://manage.microsoftazure.de/publishsettings/index
ResourceManagerUrl http://management.microsoftazure.de/
SqlDatabaseDnsSuffix .database.cloudapi.de
StorageEndpointSuffix core.cloudapi.de
... ...

To retrieve just the storage endpoint suffix property, retrieve the specific cloud and ask for just that one property.

$environment = Get-AzEnvironment -Name AzureGermanCloud
Write-Host "Storage EndPoint Suffix = " $environment.StorageEndpointSuffix

This command returns the following information:

Storage Endpoint Suffix = core.cloudapi.de

Get endpoint from a storage account

You can also examine the properties of a storage account to retrieve the endpoints:

# Get a reference to the storage account.
$resourceGroup = "myexistingresourcegroup"
$storageAccountName = "myexistingstorageaccount"
$storageAccount = Get-AzStorageAccount `
  -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup `
  -Name $storageAccountName 
  # Output the endpoints.
Write-Host "blob endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.Blob 
Write-Host "file endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.File
Write-Host "queue endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.Queue
Write-Host "table endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.Table

For a storage account in the Government Cloud, this command returns the following output:

blob endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/
file endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.file.core.usgovcloudapi.net/
queue endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.queue.core.usgovcloudapi.net/
table endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.table.core.usgovcloudapi.net/

After setting the environment

You can now use PowerShell to manage your storage accounts and access blob, queue, file, and table data. For more information, see Az.Storage.

Clean up resources

If you created a new resource group and a storage account for this exercise, you can remove both assets by deleting the resource group. Deleting the resource group deletes all resources contained within the group.

Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name $resourceGroup

Next steps