14 DAY TRIAL // Companies embracing Microsoft’s Cloud platform will certainly face many challenges, inherent with the adoption of a new OS, including manageability. However, customers can make administration of Windows Azure deployments a tad easier, provided that they are familiar with the company’s scripting language which ships as a default component of Windows. Admins should in fact be more than just familiar with PowerShell, in which case they need to access and start leveraging Windows Azure Service Management CmdLets.
Microsoft is essentially delivering a collection of PowerShell cmdlets wrapping two application programming interfaces, the Windows Azure Service Management API and Diagnostics API. Microsoft has updated the Windows Azure Service Management CmdLets recently, keeping up the pace with the evolution of the Cloud platform, namely the general availability of Windows Azure.
“I am happy to announce the updated release of the Windows Azure Service Management (WASM) Cmdlets for PowerShell today,” stated Ryan Dunn, technical evangelist for Windows Azure, at the end of the past week. “ With these cmdlets you can effectively automate and manage all your services in Windows Azure.”
The promise from Microsoft is that customers will be able to turn to the cmdlets in order to automate a range of tasks and process. Windows Azure Service Management CmdLets can be used to script out deployments, upgrades, and scaling of your Windows Azure applications. In addition, the resource also enables admins to manage diagnostics configurations.
“The WASM cmdlets were built to unblock adoption for many of our customers as well as serve as a common underpinning to our labs and internal tooling. There was an immediate demand for an automation API that would fit into the standard toolset for IT Pros. Given the adoption and penetration of PowerShell, we determined that cmdlets focused on this core audience would be the most effective way forward. Furthermore, since PowerShell is a full scripting language with complete access to .NET, this allows these cmdlets to be used as the basis for very complicated deployment and automation scripts as part of the application lifecycle,” Dunn explained.