Azure CLI Archives - Thomas Maurer

Jan082019January 8, 2019February 19, 20196 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Mastering Azure with Cloud Shell

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Work

There are multiple ways to interact and manage resources in Microsoft Azure. You can use the Azure Portal or command line tools like the Azure PowerShell module or the Azure CLI, which you can install on your local machine. However, to set up a cloud management workstation for administrators and developers can be quite a lot of work. Especially if you have multiple machines, keeping consistency between these machines can be challenging. Another challenge is keeping the environment secure and all the tools up to date. This any many more things are addressed by the Cloud Shell.

Cloud Shell is not brand new, Microsoft announced Cloud Shell at Build 2017. This blog post is about how you can master Azure with Cloud Shell and to give you an overview about the possibilities of Cloud Shell.

What is Cloud Shell

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. Azure Cloud Shell is assigned per unique user account and automatically authenticated with each session. This makes it a private and secure environment.

You get a modern web-based command line experience which can be accessed from several end points like the Azure Portal, shell.azure.com and the Azure mobile app, Visual Studio Code or directly in the Azure docs.

In the backend Azure uses containers and automatically attaches an Azure File Share to the container. You can store the data on it, so your data is persistent. This persist your data across different Cloud Shell sessions.

You can choose your preferred shell experience. Cloud Shell supports Bash and PowerShell and included your favorite third party tools and common tools and languages. If something like a module is missing, you can simply add it.

Nov122018November 12, 2018January 12, 20194 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

WLinux – The best WSL for Windows 10

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Virtualization, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Windows, Windows 10, Work

A couple of Windows 10 releases back, Microsoft delivered the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The Windows Subsystem for Linux allows you to run Linux distros, like Ubuntu, Debian, Suse and others, on Windows 10. Around the Microsoft Ignite 2018 timeframe another distro was released to the Windows Store called WLinux. WLinux is a Linux environment for Windows 10 built on work by Microsoft Research and the Debian project. WLinux is a custom Linux distro built from Debian specifically for use on the WSL. While other distros are available for WSL, WLinux is the first optimized for use by users of WSL for WSL. It helps developer run Linux tooling on Windows and integrates into perfectly into Windows.

WLinux Setup

WLinux comes with a custom setup, to prepare your environment in a very simple and easy wizard. It lets you setup some predefined software and settings and configure integration into Windows.

WLinux WSL Docker Bridge to Windows

If you want to run Docker in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, you can bring the Docker Client to the Windows Docker Engine. This allows you to run Docker directly from WSL and from PowerShell at the same time.

Microsoft Tooling

Of course WLinux brings the usual Linux development tools and easy setup for Ruby, NodeJS, Go, Java, Python, editors like emacs and even different shells. You can also easily add Microsoft tooling by adding Azure CLI, PowerShell Core and even Visual Studio Code.

Windows Explorer Integration and WSL Utilities (wslu)

It easily lets you to setup Windows Explorer integration and brings wslu, a collection of utilities for WSL, preinstalled. Wslu bringt the following features to the WSL

wslusc This is a WSL shortcut creator to create a shortcut on your Windows 10 Desktop.
wslsys This is a WSL system information printer to print out some basic system information.
wslfetch This is a WSL Screenshoot Information Tool to print information in an elegant way.
wslupath This is a WSL Windows path Converter that can convert Windows path to other styles of path.
wslview This is a fake WSL browser that can help you open link in default Windows browser.

If you want to know more about WLinux, check out the website Whitewater Foundry.

Or download WLinux from the Microsoft Store.

You can also contribute on the project on GitHub.

Apr202018April 20, 2018January 8, 20192 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Connect to Azure Stack from Azure Cloud Shell

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, PowerShell, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code

A little while ago Microsoft announced the Azure Cloud Shell. The Azure Cloud Shell is a perfect tool to manage your Azure resources using the Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell. Wouldn’t it be great to also manage your resources running on Azure Stack? Thanks to the consistency between Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure Stack, you can use the same tools to manage your hybrid cloud.

First of all login to your Azure Cloud Shell on shell.azure.com or in the Azure Portal.

After the login you have to register Azure Stack as a new cloud by running the following command:

az cloud register \
-n AzureStack \
--endpoint-resource-manager "https://management.region.url.com" \
--suffix-storage-endpoint "region.url.com" \
--suffix-keyvault-dns ".vault.region.url.com"

az cloud register \

-n AzureStack \

--endpoint-resource-manager "https://management.region.url.com" \

--suffix-storage-endpoint "region.url.com" \

--suffix-keyvault-dns ".vault.region.url.com"

Now you can list the new Azure Stack cloud by using:

az cloud list -o table

1	az cloud list -o table

To switch to the Azure Stack Cloud use the following command:

az cloud set -n AzureStack

1	az cloud set -n AzureStack

If you are doing this the first time and you use another account you can use az login to login.

az login

az login

One thing you should do is to switch the profile version to an Azure Stack compatible version

az cloud update --profile 2017-03-09-profile

1	az cloud update --profile 2017-03-09-profile

Now you can start using the Azure CLI in the Azure Cloud Shell to manage your Azure Stack. First of all yes this works also if you just use the Azure CLI. In the case this case, the Azure Stack needs to be accessible from the internet. If your Azure Stack is not accessible from the internet, you can just use the Azure CLI directly from your management machine.

Azure Cloud Shell is very powerful, you can run Azure CLI as well as Azure PowerShell. Fun Fact, since you an also run the Azure Cloud Shell directly in Visual Studio Code, you can also just open up the shell session and start working from Visual Studio Code.

You can learn more in my blog post: Mastering Azure with Cloud Shell

Dec282017December 28, 2017January 8, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Azure Cloud Shell – shell.azure.com and in Visual Studio Code

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Web, Windows 10, Work

Back in May Microsoft made the Azure Cloud Shell available in the Microsoft Azure Portal. Now you can use it even quicker by just go to shell.azure.com. First you login with your Microsoft account or Work and School account, and if your account is in multiple Azure Active Directory tenants, you select the right tenant and you will be automatically logged in. So even if you are on a PC where you can not install the Azure CLI or the Azure PowerShell module, you can still easily fire up a shell where you can run the Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell and other CLI tools like Docker, Kubectl, emacs, vim, nano, git and more.

In addition you can also open up Azure Cloud Shell directly from Visual Studio Code

With that, enjoy your holidays and I wish you a good start in the new year!

Oct242017October 24, 2017August 27, 20187 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Docker for Windows Update Linux Containers

How to run Docker Linux Container on Windows 10 Fall Creator Update

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Docker, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization, Web, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server, Work

I just blogged about how to run a Docker Linux Container natively on the new Windows Server version 1709. Docker today released a new update for Docker on Windows which also enables this scenario a little bit easier on your Windows 10 machine. It will ask you if you want to use the new feature to run Linux Containers natively on a Hyper-V Container running on Windows 10 (without the Moby VM).

As you can see the only thing right now you have to turn the feature on and off, since in this technical preview it is not yet possible to run Linux and Windows containers in parallel. But I guess soon that will be the case.

What you need is:

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (Build 16299, Version 1709, RS3)
Docker for Windows 17.10.0-ce-win36 (13788) or higher

Enable Linux Containers on Windows

You can change the settings in the Docker Settings:

With hat setting on you can now run Linux Containers such as ubuntu on Windows directly, without having a Linux Virutal Machine running in the background to host the Linux containers.

Now you can also do some other fancy things like run the Azure CLI in a Linux Container on Windows 10.

Simple and effective, and it will be even more powerful when you can run Linux and Windows Container in parallel on Windows Sever and on Windows 10.

May112017May 11, 2017January 8, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack, PowerShell, Virtualization, Web, Web, Work

Today at the Microsoft Build Conference, Microsoft announced the Azure Cloud Shell. The Azure Cloud Shell is a browser-based shell experience to manage and develop Azure resources.

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. Today it gives you a variety of different tools directly from your web browser in the Azure Portal.

This gives Azure Administrators an easy admin environment to manage resources as well as third-party applications. In the background Microsoft runs thousands of isolated containers, ready for you to use. Microsoft takes care of keeping this container up to date, so you can focus on your administrator tasks. The usage is free, the only thing you will need to pay, are the storage cost for your container and the things you store on the Azure File Share.

Linux shell interpreter

Bash
sh

Azure tools

Azure CLI 2.0 and 1.0

Text editors

vim
nano
emacs

Source control

Build tools

make
maven
npm
pip

Containers

Docker
Kubectl
DC/OS CLI

Databases

MySQL client
PostgreSql client
sqlcmd Utility

Other

iPython Client

It also looks like PowerShell will be available later, hopefully it will arrive soon. Microsoft also announced Azure PowerShell 3.0. If you want to learn, check out my blog post: Mastering Azure with Cloud Shell