This presentation offers a perspective on the variety of ways users can implement Infrastructure-as-Code using command line processors for Microsoft Azure.

Most new users of Microsoft's Azure public cloud platform begin with the Azure portal experience, which exposes the breadth of services offered on Azure along with multi-step dialogs for configuring and creating new service instances. In addition, the portal provides service-specific interfaces for modifying existing services; these interfaces can vary subtly or radically from each other depending on the service. Also, these interfaces can change from time-to-time which can lead to configuration mistakes and time-consuming updates to user training.

The good news is that Microsoft exposes the service-configuration surface as a collection of REST APIs and offers API "wrappers" for popular programming languages, enabling developers to build applications which manage Azure infrastructure. For non-developers, the alternative to the Azure Portal UI is a command-line processor. Just to complicate matters, Microsoft supports 2 command-line processors (Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell). Command-line processors run in a command shell - Azure supports several command shells:
• Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe)
• Windows PowerShell/PowerShell (pwsh.exe)
• Bash (native to UNIX/Linux systems)
• Azure CloudShell (hosted in a container running Ubuntu Linux)
Running a command shell requires a software program which supports the selected shell. These include:
• Terminal (OS X for Mac)
• Windows Terminal
• Visual Studio Code

There is no "best" choice considering Operating System, Command Shell, and Command-line processor choices. This presentation will explore how the combinations of these options align with user capabilities and preferences to help individual users select which combination(s) will work best for them in any given environment.