PowerShell has existed within Windows for some time now, providing much superior scripting / automation abilities than the old command line. Although, you can use the Azure Xplat CLI from the command line on Windows, Linux or Mac, the Azure PowerShell cmdlets provide a better environment to create, test, deploy and manage your Azure solutions using Windows PowerShell.Install Azure PowerShell
The installation of Azure PowerShell is done by using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer that Microsoft has been using lately to make installing many other platform components fairly simple.
Once Azure PowerShell has been installed, it’s a good idea to restart the machine to ensure that the Azure PowerShell cmdlets are completely registered with PowerShell; otherwise you may encounter some errors when you try to execute cmdlets.
Azure Cmdlet All The Things
There are many, many different cmdlets for Azure PowerShell that let you create, test, deploy and manage virtually all of the features of Azure that can be managed using the Azure Management Portal. The features of Azure PowerShell is also comparable to the features of the Azure Xplat CLI.
However, it’s worth noting that some Azure features aren’t not supported with Azure PowerShell. This is mostly due to the fact that Azure is growing very quickly and new features are released very frequently. One example, at the time of writing this article, that’s not currently supported for management with the Azure PowerShell is the full features of Azure Service Bus, more specifically Azure Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions.
Azure Cmdlet Help
To get help with what Azure PowerShell Cmdlets are available you can run the following command within PowerShell after Azure PowerShell has already been installed:
Help Azure
To get help with a specific Azure PowerShell Cmdlet, just call the cmdlet with “-?” appended to it, like below:
Add-AzureAccount -?
Additional Information
Here’s a link with more information from the Azure documentation that covers installing and using Azure PowerShell:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/powershell-install-configure/
