The priority for Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell remains to provide our customers with the most complete, secure, and easy-to-use tools to manage Azure resources.
At Microsoft Ignite 2023, we are announcing the following new capabilities delivering on our priorities:
- Extending our coverage and improving how we build commands.
- Improving the supportability of Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell
- Usability improvements
Extending our coverage
In the past six months, we have added or refreshed coverage for those new or existing Azure services within 30 days of their general availability.
Services with new commands
|
Service Name |
Azure PowerShell commands |
Azure CLI commands |
|
Fluid Relay |
||
|
StorageCache |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.storagecache |
|
|
GraphServices |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.graphservices/ |
|
|
NewRelic |
||
|
Quantum |
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/service-page/quantum |
|
|
PaloAltoNetworks |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.paloaltonetworks/ |
|
|
SiteRecovery |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.recoveryservices/new-azrecoveryservicesvault |
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/site-recovery?view=azure-cli-latest |
|
AzureSphere |
/ |
|
|
ElasticSAN |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.elasticsan/ |
|
|
StorageMover |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.storagemover/ |
|
|
Attestation |
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/az.attestation/ |
|
|
Connectedvmware |
/ |
Note: To use the associated commands, you may need to manually install the Azure CLI extension or the Azure PowerShell module.
For details about all of the commands that have been updated, as well as a complete list of great and exciting new features of this release for the Azure client tools, see the release notes of each tool:
- Azure CLI: https://learn.microsoft.com/cli/azure/release-notes-azure-cli
- Azure PowerShell: https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/azure/release-notes-azureps
We are committed to making Azure resources manageable through the command-line tool of your choice. Over the last six months, we have added 12 Azure PowerShell modules or Azure CLI extensions that support new services and refreshed two resource API versions.
We are standardizing how we build our commands and refreshing legacy code when necessary to support our ongoing effort to address the inconsistencies between commands. We have increased the number of commands built using this standard approach by 13% and will continue this effort in the coming months.
Improving the supportability of Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell
Being supported is a shared responsibility between the customers who need to stay on a supported version and the product team, which should do its due diligence to inform customers when they are in an unsupported mode.
We are improving the overall supportability of Azure clients through the following announcements:
- Notification about the use of unsupported versions of Azure clients
- In-tool notification of available updates
- List of upcoming breaking changes
- Retirement of AzureRM PowerShell modules
Azure Advisor recommendations for Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell
Azure Advisor can now notify Azure subscriptions where outdated versions of Azure client tools are used. Customers can receive our recommendations by enabling Azure Advisor and configuring it in the Operational Excellence category.
The current definitions of outdated versions are:
- Azure CLI: version earlier than 2.42.0
- Azure PowerShell: 1.*.* - 9.*.*
We encourage everyone to upgrade to the latest version to benefit from the security, performance, and user experience improvements.
In-tool notification of available updates with Azure PowerShell
In-tool notifications for version upgrades of Azure PowerShell is a feature released in Azure PowerShell module version 10.3.0. In the 10.3.0 version, they're disabled by default. Beginning with version 11.0.0, they're enabled by default, and all clients will see relevant notifications.
When you upgrade to version 11.0.0, upgrade notifications are enabled by default. When you run a cmdlet in Azure PowerShell, the system will prompt you to upgrade to the latest version if you're using a version lower than the newest version. Notifications will appear every 30 days thereafter. If running a script, it's also presented with a warning message. Here are examples:
- If all Az modules are installed, the following warning message is displayed for PowerShellGet 2.*.
- If only some Az modules are installed, the following warning message is displayed for PowerShellGet 3.*.
If you want to disable this feature, please refer to the configuration documentation.
https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/azure/configure-global-settings#upgrade-notifications
Breaking change documentation improvement in Azure PowerShell
We enhanced our upcoming breaking change article by adding the module target version and Az version to help customers understand how updating their client version may impact their scripts and pipelines.
Our next release with breaking changes will accompany Microsoft Build.
See our upcoming breaking changes article to read more about the breaking changes in this version and ensure your environment is ready to install the newest version of Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell.
Azure CLI: Upcoming breaking changes in Azure
Azure PowerShell: Upcoming breaking changes in Azure PowerShell | Microsoft Learn
AzureRM Retirement
This is a reminder that the AzureRM PowerShell modules will retire on February 29, 2024.
If you have not done so yet, please update your scripts that use AzureRM PowerShell modules to use the Azure PowerShell modules by 29 February 2024.
You can automatically update your scripts using the getting started guide.
Related documents:
Usability improvements
The Azure command-line team continuously works on making Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell easier to use by addressing customer challenges with these tools.
Highlighted Update: Azure Copilot for Azure CLI
Microsoft Copilot for Azure is an AI companion that helps you design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure and services. Combining the power of cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) with the Azure Resource Model, Copilot for Azure enables rich understanding and management of everything happening in Azure, from the cloud to the edge.
We added to Copilot for Azure the knowledge of Azure CLI commands and end-to-end scenarios to answer questions related to Azure CLI commands or scripts following our best practices.
When you tell Microsoft Copilot for Azure (preview) about a task you want to perform using Azure CLI, it provides a script with the necessary commands. You'll see which placeholder values you need to update with the actual values based on your environment.
To learn more about Microsoft Copilot for Azure and how it can help you, visit: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-infrastructure-blog/simplify-it-management-with-microso...
Please click here to sign up. We’ll onboard customers into the preview on a weekly basis. In the coming weeks, we'll continuously add new capabilities and make improvements based on your feedback.
Key Vault template-based preview version
We have released template-based previews of Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell for Key Vault:
This preview based on template deployments brings the following benefits:
- Consistency: Ensure consistent behavior and defaults between Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and Portal.
- What-If: Support a ‘what if’ option to predict the impact of deployment before the command is executed.
- Idempotency: Sending the same request multiple times will produce the same result, regardless of resource state.
Read the following article to learn more about this preview: Announcing template-based previews of Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell for Key Vault deployments - Mic...
AAD renamed to Microsoft Entra ID on Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell
Azure AD has been renamed. Microsoft Entra ID is the new name for Azure AD. The names Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, and AAD have been replaced with Microsoft Entra ID. For details, refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/fundamentals/new-name.
For Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell, the reference documentation for Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell has been changed to accommodate this rebranding, but command names have not been changed in order to prevent breaking changes.
Trim Azure CLI’s docker image size
We are delighted to announce that the docker image size of azure-cli has been significantly reduced from 1.1GB to 700MB (trimmed 36.3% of the original package) with the release of version 2.54.0.
Two fundamental changes achieve this accomplishment:
- Removal of unnecessary packages: We have removed several development tools packages (such as gcc) and unused packages from the docker image, resulting in a savings of 200MB. If you rely on these packages, remember to install them manually.
- Improved docker build process: We have utilized RUN --mount to remove the intermediate COPY layer in the image, which saves an additional 200MB. This change will also result in faster execution time when running docker pull commands.
You can find the complete list of excluded packages at https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli/pull/27567.
General Availability of Az.Tools.Installer for Azure PowerShell
We are delighted to announce that Az.Tools.Installer is now generally available after three years of preview. Thousands of customers have downloaded and used it. We recommend you try it if you haven't had a chance yet.
Az.Tools.Installer is a tool for managing the versions of Azure PowerShell modules. It is straightforward to use and only contains three cmdlets for installing, uninstalling and updating separately.
With it, you can:
- Install and manage the specific Az modules you use instead of all of them.
- Remove all previously installed Az and AzureRM modules with one cmdlet.
- Update to the new version by replacing the previous one.
- Performance improvement, especially in PowerShell 7 compared to the PowerShellGet cmdlets
- Install a single online NuGet package with a URL.
For more information on how to use it, please refer to the module documentation. Please let us know about your experience with the module and request features or report issues on GitHub or Twitter.
Thank you for using the Azure command-line tools. We look forward to continuing to improve your experience.
We hope you enjoy Ignite and all the great work released this week. We'd love to hear your feedback, so feel free to reach out anytime.
- Let's be in touch on X (Twitter) : @azureposh @AzureCli
