Azure Cloud Shell - A new way to manage cloud

“This gives you a fantastic way to manage all of your Azure resources,” Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie noted and added that the company believes that this feature will help developers to become more productive.
Yeah this is an amazing feature introduced by Microsoft in Azure, where you can have Bash shell deployed within azure portal that too pre logged in!  

Let's have a look at where you can find CLI shell and execute few commands

You can find the CLI shell on right most corner of Azure Portal as shown below

Click on the Shell icon. CLI make use use of Azure share to create $Home directory which also used to store few session data. Select the subscription you currently using and click on Create storage.

It takes few minutes to activate your shell.Once activated you will land up with the following window. Where you have an option of selecting the shell you want to use (default Bash and Power Shell will be introduced soon) and a button to restart the shell.

Now type "az" and press "Enter", it will show the start up screen as below. 'az' is the command used to manage all the resources and services provided by Azure such as Virtual machines, database servers etc.

Execute "az -h". which will list all the commands you can make use within the shell.

For example in order to get the list of Virtual Machines created you can use

az vm list -o table

Which prints the list of VMs created and their status

There are few additional announcements made by Microsoft along with CLI shell like 

• Azure Mobile Service App- Manage your cloud anywhere from your phone(Android and ios)
• Fixing production bugs in code using Visual Studio
• General availability of Visual Studio for Mac

Happy Coding :)