Four reasons to love cloud shell



Cloud shell is one of the nicest more recent additions to the azure 'family' (if i can call it that). I'm using it more and more and thought i would share a few things i discovered recently that enhance working with it. It's now surprising what you can actually do it.

The Azure portal is now getting closer and closer to allowing you to do almost everything from a browser.

So first up

1) You can open cloud shell directly without clicking the button in an existing portal session. To do this just go to https://shell.azure.com

Do that and you'll go through authentication in the normal way and select your tenant then you get a full screen cloud shell


2) You can just drag files in from windows explorer directly in to cloud shell

Simply drag the file

Get the progress box


And work with the file - easy



3) You can use vscode (well not the full thing but sort of) directly in cloudshell

just type

code filename-here

and the editor opens inside cloudshell - any you get nice colour coding and loads of other stuff



you even get your command line back and can do other things while editing the file!

4) you can now open the kubernetes console direct from cloudshell

Only discovered this yesterday - a new syntax is available (not sure when it was released) - if you run the following steps from cloud shell you get an additional tab open up with the kubernetes console - no need for a local install


az account set --subscription YOUR_SUB_NAME       # may not be needed if you only have 1 sub
az aks get-credentials --resource-group YOUR_RG_NAME --name YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME    # to pull down keys and set current context
az aks browse --resource-group YOUR_RG_NAME --name YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME --enable-cloud-console-aks-browse

The key bit is the last parameter at the end in orange - if you use that the new tab opens up and you see the console direct.

The url is shown below - you can see its somehow enabled some new network route in here to let you access it




There you go quick wrap up of some of the things it can do - personally i love it. I can now do most of my work from a browser - which means you can just work from a tablet/phone device from pretty much anywhere and get stuff done


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