Posts in this Series
- It Begins – Azure with PowerShell I
- Accounts – Azure with PowerShell II
- Accounts Continued – Azure with PowerShell III
I had a conversation with someone recently, which reminded me of an event in my life. I was sitting in the yard, maybe up to 15 years ago, pulling weeds. In southern Arizona, getting rid of the weeds is what you do, one way or another. Either you do it, or you pay someone else to do it. While I’ve yet to pay for such a service, I remember thinking, why am I doing this? Why am I sitting in the yard during the weekend when I could be sitting in the house and learning more about this IT career of mine? My competition is in there … figuratively. They’re learning more than me now, sitting here, learning nothing, except which weeds are going to leave a sticky residue on my fingertips, or poke me, or never come out of the earth with the roots intact, ever. Every minute I’m not learning more about what I do, someone else is gaining an advantage over me. More dollars, more vacations, more iRobot vacuums, which I hear are great–that’s what this person was telling me–but how would I know?
Don’t get me wrong, everyone has to have non-work-related hobbies and things to do, but pulling weeds probably isn’t it.
So, I am beginning my journey into Azure, alongside PowerShell. Or just maybe, I have that backward: My journey into PowerShell, alongside Azure. No. I have over 10 years’ worth of PowerShell experience and we’ll say a couple of years of Azure? I did receive an Azure (and M365) Fundamentals certificate, so maybe I know something. It’s been a while though, as I work closely with AWS five days a week. Regardless of how I think about this though, I’m going to learn one with the help of the other. I’ve done this before; I started with the cmdlets first: “I’m just starting to get my hands wet with Microsoft Lync. As I often do, I use the Windows PowerShell cmdlets to help learn more about a product; I did this same thing with Hyper-V.” Then, once I’m comfortable with those, maybe I head into the UI and see if I can duplicate what the commands do.
I recommend you do as I did, and begin with the two, below posts to get started with Azure PowerShell. These are quick, easy reads, one of which will assist with ensuring you have the Azure PowerShell module installed.
While I’ve been writing about PowerShell for a while, I think with this series, I’m going to approach things as though my visitors aren’t as experienced with PowerShell as my normal audience. So, if you’re my normal audience, some of the PowerShell concepts I mention may seem a touch basic, but with good reason. Knowing PowerShell and learning how to make things happen, is much different than knowing a product or service, and then learning PowerShell.
And bonus, the 8.0.0 version of the Az PowerShell module was released, today. That’s right, Tuesday, May 24, 2022–the first day of this series. The below, Find-Modulecommand, searches the PowerShell Gallery for the module and populates the $AzModuleInfo variable full of information–not just the Name, Version, and PublishedDate, although Select-Object does filter the output after the variable collects it all. Be sure to inspect the variable closely to view all the things that it contains. While Find-Module won’t install the module, Install-Module will. Before you run away with that command, though, read the two above links. More soon!
Find-Module -Name Az -OutVariable AzModuleInfo | Select-Object -Property Name,Version,PublishedDate Name Version PublishedDate ---- ------- ------------- Az 8.0.0 5/24/2022 1:05:02 AM
$AzModuleInfo | Select-Object -Property *
Name : Az
Version : 8.0.0
Type : Module
Description : Microsoft Azure PowerShell - Cmdlets to manage resources in Azure. This module is compatible with PowerShell and Windows PowerShell.
For more information about the Az module, please visit the following: https://docs.microsoft.com/powershell/azure/
Author : Microsoft Corporation
CompanyName : azure-sdk...