Azure Powershell Part 1-Setup and Start

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Using Powershell in Azure is a powerful and quick way to script and automate frequent coming tasks. starting with Azure Powershell there some pre-requisites, I won’t go into much details here but basically how to load / install the Azure Powershell module can be found here

Once you successfully installed Azure Powershell on your machine you can do have a bunch of new commands available

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To get a better overview of all commandlets related to a specific module you can use a.e. Get-Command -Module Azure

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Now we have to connect to Azure and set up subscription data so we have a connection to Azure

Step 1: Add your account
1.At the PowerShell prompt, type Add-AzureAccount and click Enter.
2.Type in the email address associated with your Azure subscription and click Continue.
3.Type in the password for your account.
4.Click Sign in.

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you can do this interactively or you can script that

 $cred = Get-Credential 
Add-AzureAccount -Credential $cred

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or to automate this in a script to avoid pop-up you can also use

$userName = "<your organizational account user name>" $securePassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "<your organizational account password>" -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($userName, $securePassword) Add-AzureAccount -Credential $cred

Note: take security considerations into account when hard coding service accounts / passwords. consider decrypt/encrypt password in your scrip runtime

Step 2: Set your subscription and storage account

Set your Azure subscription and storage account by running these commands at the Windows PowerShell command prompt. Replace everything within the quotes, including the < and > characters, with the correct names.

$subscr="<subscription name>" $staccount="<storage account name>" Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscr –Current Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscr -CurrentStorageAccountName $staccount

You can get the correct subscription name from the SubscriptionName property of the output of the Get-AzureSubscription command. You can get the correct storage account name from the Label property of the output of the Get-AzureStorageAccount command after you run the Select-AzureSubscription command