Azure Cloud Shell Preview

Being a fan of PowerShell and having a lot of customers who are relying on the cloud means that Microsoft’s new ‘Azure Cloud Shell’ brings PowerShell awesomeness to your browser. Yes, I said Browser. To be fair, Microsoft has written up some fairly decent documentation on it and it can be found here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-shell/overview. While that is great for a place to start, what about its practical use? Just because a tool is available, doesn’t mean its what you need. In this article we’ll explore any known limitations, upsides and more about this new feature.
Firing Up Azure Cloud Shell
In order to access this new interface, make sure to log into your Azure tenant portal – https://portal.azure.com. Once logged in, you can see the PowerShell icon at the very top of the portal:

When clicked, a new window appears at the bottom of your portal:

Notice you can also run Bash (Linux) from here as well. If we click on ‘PowerShell (Windows), the screen changes again and we now have a PowerShell interface. There is a small amount of space required to run and if you don’t have any storage mounted, you will see a screen like this:

The storage can be done automatically by the wizard or click on the ‘Show Advanced Settings’ and you can customize the storage configuration:

For this example, I will use the ‘Create Storage’ without using the Advanced Settings.

For a first time connection, with creating the storage, it could take up to a minute (like it says above….):

What’s nice is that the window can be resized as needed as well.

Modules available once connected:

For an administrator this new interface provides a bit of a shortcut for access the Azure RM PowerShell module.

After using it for a day, here are my thoughts on it:
Advantages

• Acts like PowerShell
• Get-Help
• Copy
• Tab
• Up arrow
• Once in your portal, you can access both GUI and Shell in one interface
• No need to login in twice. Once in the portal you can connect PowerShell to your tenant
• With the use of Azure Storage, scripts can be stored in the cloud and run from the cloud shell
• Access to quite a few PowerShell cmdlets and Azure modules
• Notice that the shell can also be used to browse your resources and other items in your tenant:
  

Disadvantages

• Limited workspace as I have the GUI and PowerShell window on one screen. If more workspace were desired, one would either need another browser window, or open up PowerShell and connect to your Azure tenant.
• Timeout of 20 min. Potentially an issue depending on what you are doing in PowerShell:
  

Second Time Run
The next time Cloud Shell is run, the experience will show up a little differently.

Conclusion
Being able to run PowerShell from a browser and while also reviewing your Azure resources in your tenant is an interesting experience. Remember that his feature is currently in preview and more features are bound to come in the next few months.