Azure Cloud Shell

Azure Cloud Shell can be found in the Azure Portal, as shown in the following screenshot:

Afterwards, the Shell will open either in Bash or PowerShell. The connection will look like this and opens in the Azure drive (Azure:):

The PowerShell version that is used for PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell currently is version 5.1 in the Desktop Edition, which is hosted in a Docker container. We will elaborate on that in Chapter 14, Working with Azure which is dedicated to PowerShell and Azure:

Features of PowerShell in Cloud Shell

The PowerShell experience builds upon the benefits of Azure Cloud Shell, such as the following:

• Secure automatic authentication from virtually anywhere
• Choice of shell experience that best suits the way you work
• Common tools and programming languages included that are updated and maintained by Microsoft
• Azure File Storage, which allows access to an Azure file share in a storage account for a small monthly fee associated with data storage. File Storage is mapped as the cloud drive and can be used to exchange data.

The PowerShell experience adds the following:

• The new PSDrive for Azure (Azure:)—this provides easier searching capabilities within Azure resources
• Dedicated and built-in commands
• Data persistence via cloud drive
• Custom modules
• User profile
• Rich tools support
• Azure PowerShell
• Nano and VIM (with PS IntelliSense)
• Git and sqlcmd

For more information on PowerShell features, refer to https://aka.ms/cloudshell/PowerShell-Docs.

The first big achievement here is the new Azure drive. Here, you can just work directly on Azure and retrieve your Azure resources, as shown in this screenshot:

Feedback on Azure Cloud Shell is tracked on UserVoice via issues and feature requests: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/598699-azure-cloud-shell.