Hi. My name is Trevor Sullivan, a Microsoft MVP for Windows PowerShell. Today I'm here to talk to you about the Azure cross-platform CLI tool that allows you to automate tasks around Microsoft Azure from your Linux, Windows, or Mac OSX system.

Let's start by taking a look at an introduction to how the tool works. In this section, we're going to cover applicable scenarios, GitHub projects page, the application's architecture, and the basic functions of the tool.

When you want to automate tasks against Microsoft Azure, such as provisioning cloud resources, or managing existing resources, or administering functions of your subscription, you'll want to use a variety of different platforms, such as Linux, Mac OSX, and the Windows platform.

We need a solution that allows us to automate these tasks from across any of these platforms. The Azure cross-platform CLI tool is a project that's hosted by Microsoft on GitHub. It's an open source development project, and it allows us to manage Azure resources from the command line. So on the GitHub project page, we can track the tool's development, we can report new issues that we encounter, such as documentation bugs or functional gaps, or functional bugs, and we can also contribute bug or documentation fixes, because we can issue pull requests against the official GitHub repository.

Let's take a look at the application's architecture. As we mentioned before, Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows are all supported platforms by this tool. The Node.js application framework can be installed on any of these three platforms. And then finally, the Microsoft Azure cross-platform CLI tool sits on top of that and allows us to perform automation tasks through the Node.js application framework.

There's two different modes of operation for the cross-platform CLI tool. The first mode is the Azure resource manager mode, and what this allows us to do is perform operational tasks against the Microsoft Azure Resource Manager API. Now, this isn't a focal topic of this course. However, we will be talking about how to perform automation tasks against both the Azure Resource Manager rest API, in addition to the Azure Service Management API. The Microsoft Azure platform provides two different rest APIs, and Microsoft is in the process of migrating all of the functionality from the service management API, which is an XML imperative provisioning rest API, over to the Azure Resource Manager API, which is both an imperative and a declarative management API for our cloud resources.

Let's take a look at the basic structure of the Azure cross-platform CLI tool. Once the tool's been installed, which we'll look at later, the Azure tool can be called simply by calling Azure at the command line. There's a couple of different groupings of child commands, and the Azure command is basically broken out into a tree of commands.

So first we have kind of a category of administrative tasks, and those could be things like looking at our Azure subscriptions or accounts, looking at subscription cloud consumption, Active Directory tasks, roles in Active Directory, managing resource groups, managing Azure resource providers, configuration, which is basically the ASM or ARM mode, and then individual features of each Azure resource provider.

On the resource side, we have the actual management of cloud resource instances, such as virtual networks, virtual machines, application insights, web apps, API apps, and much more.

One of the great features of the Azure cross-platform CLI tool is the ability to provide JSON output. Because the Unix shell is not object-oriented like PowerShell is, we can actually take the output from the Azure command, convert it to JSON, and then pass it into a command that's able to read those JSON objects and parse them, and then sort them, and we can manage our data more effectively that way. Most of the Azure cross-platform CLI tools commands enable this capability by simply appending the --json parameter.