Windows Azure–multi-platform command line interface into the cloud

There has been a lot of interesting work on windows Azure and if you have been following closely you may have noticed a tremendous growth of tooling and support for a number of open source projects. Scott Gu recently announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.0 with awesome features. Some of the announcements included from Hadoop support in Windows Azure to AMQP support with Windows Azure Service Bus.

Some of the most interesting things is the command line tooling that was released that enables the developers to develop freely and have a second or third process take over the deployment into Windows Azure. These tools work on Windows, Mac and Linux. You may have been using other platforms such as Ubuntu and thinking of how you can participate in the cloud, and how you can scale your applications to a wider range of users. Well... Looks like all the common platforms are taken care of. I should also mention that the CLI tooling is open source, you can find it here https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat. You are free to download it and see that there is no smoking mirrors, just plain old code.

Getting Started

Visit https://nodejs.org/download/ to download Node.js relevant to your platform.

Ensure that the path where npm is installed exists in the PATH folder. To test, you can simply start cmd.exe and type npm. This should give you the usage informaion as shown below.

Type npm install -g azure-cli to download the client tools. That will start downloading the modules required to perform Windows Azure administration. From here you can use the azure command if you want to see the usage

With the CLI you are able to perform very interesting things. Most people prefer to have a build process which take over when a code base is committed into the repository, runs unit tests, perform some activities on their Windows Azure websites for maintenance purposes. This is greatly enhanced by this sort of tooling.

For documentation on how to build and deploy applications to Windows Azure please see the Windows Azure Developer Center. For comprehensive documentation on the full set of Cross platform Windows Azure CLI see https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat

References

https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overviewhttps://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop
https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/how-to-guides/powershell-cmdlets/
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkID=254459&clcid=0x409

https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-net