Decide if Azure PowerShell is right for your tasks

  • 5 minutes

Suppose you need to choose a tool to administer the Azure resources you'll use to test your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Your tests require you to create resource groups and provision virtual machines (VMs).

You want something that's easy for administrators to learn, but powerful enough to automate installing and setting up multiple virtual machines or script a full application environment. There are multiple tools available, and you need to find the best one for your people and tasks.

What tools are available?

Azure provides three administration tools:

  • The Azure portal
  • The Azure CLI
  • Azure PowerShell

These tools all offer approximately the same amount of control; any task that you can do with one of the tools, you can likely do with the other two. All three are cross-platform, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux. They differ in syntax, setup requirements, automation support.

Here, we'll describe each of the three options and provide some guidance on how to decide among them.

What is the Azure portal?

The Azure portal is a website that lets you create, configure, and alter the resources in your Azure subscription. The portal is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that makes it convenient to locate the resource you need and execute any required changes. It also guides you through complex administrative tasks by providing wizards and tooltips.

The portal doesn't provide any way to automate repetitive tasks. For example, to set up 15 VMs, you'd need to create them one by one, completing the wizard for each VM. This method can be time consuming, and it's error prone for complex tasks.

What is the Azure CLI?

The Azure CLI is a cross-platform command-line program to connect to Azure and execute administrative commands on Azure resources. For example, to create a VM, you could use the following command:

az vm create \
  --resource-group CrmTestingResourceGroup \
  --name CrmUnitTests \
  --image Ubuntu2204
  ...

The Azure CLI is available two ways: inside a browser via the Azure Cloud Shell, or with a local installation on Linux, Mac, or Windows. In both cases, you can use it interactively or use it with scripts to automate tasks. For interactive use, you'd first launch a shell (such as cmd.exe on Windows or Bash on Linux or macOS) then issue the commands at the shell prompt. To automate repetitive tasks, you'd assemble the commands into a shell script using the script syntax of your chosen shell, then execute the script.

What is Azure PowerShell?

Azure PowerShell is a module you add to PowerShell to let you connect to your Azure subscription and manage resources. Azure PowerShell requires PowerShell to function. PowerShell provides services like the shell window, command parsing, and so on. The Azure Az PowerShell module adds Azure-specific commands.

For example, Azure PowerShell provides the New-AzVM command, which creates a virtual machine for you in your Azure subscription. To use it, launch the PowerShell application and issue the following command:

New-AzVm `
    -ResourceGroupName "CrmTestingResourceGroup" `
    -Name "CrmUnitTests" `
    -Image "UbuntuLTS"
    ...

Azure PowerShell is also available two ways: inside a browser via the Azure Cloud Shell, or with a local installation on Linux, Mac, or Windows. In both cases, you have two modes to choose from. You can use it in interactive mode, in which you manually issue one command at a time; or in scripting mode, where you execute a script that consists of multiple commands.

How to Choose an administrative tool

There's approximate parity between the portal, the Azure CLI, and Azure PowerShell with respect to the Azure objects they can administer and the configurations they can create. They're also all cross-platform. Typically, you'll consider several other factors when making your choice:

  • Automation: Do you need to automate a set of complex or repetitive tasks? Azure PowerShell and the Azure CLI support automation, but Azure portal doesn't.

  • Learning curve: Do you need to complete a task quickly without learning new commands or syntax? The Azure portal doesn't require you to learn syntax or memorize commands. In Azure PowerShell and the Azure CLI, you must know the detailed syntax for each command you use.

  • Team skillset: Does your team have existing expertise? For example, your team might have used PowerShell to administer Windows. If so, they'll quickly become comfortable using Azure PowerShell.

Example

Recall that you're choosing an administrative tool to create the test environments for your CRM application. Your administrators have two specific Azure tasks they need to complete:

  1. Create one resource group for each category of testing (unit, integration, and acceptance).
  2. Create multiple VMs in each resource group before every round of testing.

To create the resource groups, the Azure portal is a reasonable choice. These tasks are one-offs, so you don't need scripts to complete them.

Finding the best tool to create the VMs is a more challenging decision. You need to create several VMs, and you need to create them repeatedly, likely several times each week. For these tasks, you'll want automation, so the Azure portal isn't a good choice. In this case, either Azure PowerShell or the Azure CLI will meet your needs. If your team members have some existing PowerShell knowledge, Azure PowerShell is likely the best match. Azure PowerShell is available on the operating systems your admin team uses, it supports automation, and should be quick for your team to learn.

Most administrators' first experience with Azure is in the Azure portal. It's a great place to start because it provides a clean, well-structured graphical interface, but it provides limited options for automation. When you need automation, Azure gives you two options: Azure PowerShell for admins with PowerShell experience and the Azure CLI for everyone else.

In practice, businesses typically have a mix of one-off and repetitive tasks, so it's common to use both the Azure portal and a scripting solution. In our CRM example, it's appropriate to create the resource groups via the Azure portal and automate the VM creation with PowerShell.

The rest of this module focuses on installing and using Azure PowerShell.