I recently wrote a blog post, The Great Azure Cmdlet Renaming – Coming Soon, that noted the coming changes in the PowerShell module for Azure. Well – a few weeks is a very long time, when your clock is set to Internet Time! That article, and others, caused some rethinking within Microsoft and things have changed.
One key issue that the earlier plan raised was that it meant lots and lots of existing automation would need to be updated to take advantage of the later versions of the Azure module. I have thousands of lines of automation, all created using the ASM API. The big change is that, instead of renaming the ASM cmdlets, it's the ARM cmdlets that get renamed. Thus the impact is much less.
Towards the end of a long thread at https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/issues/428, David Justice sets out the updated plan of action as:
- Remove Switch-AzureMode and remove modal behaviour from Azure PowerShell
- Re-factor the AzureResourceManager module into component modules by service and functionality (management vs. data plane by service)
- Rename cmdlets in AzureResourceManager module from [Verb]-Azure[Noun] to [Verb]-AzureRM[Noun] (e.g. Get-AzureRMVM). Implicitly this means the Azure ServiceManager cmdlets in Azure PowerShell do not get renamed.
- Distribute Azure and AzureResourceManager modules via PowerShell Gallery
- Adding automated documentation submission to content team for publication (MSDN) upon release for all modules
There is a lot of detail in the Github post, which you should read, that explains the background and some of the details. The good news is that these changes should be available towards the end of September (2015), with Azure Automation updates at around the same time. As of the time of posting, I've seen nothing to suggest those time scales will not be met – but watch this space.
- All in all, progress and some good news. But confirmation of a bit of bad news too for ARM Cmdlet users)
0 Comments