I’ve been studying Azure recently and came across a really interesting Azure site.

resources.azure.com

To give you an idea why I find this view so interesting I’m going to drill down to a SQL Database that I have.

Up front, you can see some interesting information. The location, status, service level, creation date, default collation etc. And obviously, the information is specific to the type of object you are looking at.

Now this is just default tab. The GET, PUT tab. Which basically shows you the get command of the resource manager API that calls this information, and if you hit the edit button you can actually change information in the JSON output and issue a PUT command to send it back. I’ll admit up front that this is a bit beyond me as I don’t do API calls and I’m new enough to Azure that I don’t know what I can and can’t change (everything I’ve tried so far hasn’t worked). There are several other tabs, though, including a Powershell one and I’m a bit more familiar with Powershell. In it, you can see some of the Powershell commands associated with the resource manager and this particular object.

# PowerShell equivalent script

# GET Ken_Test
Get-AzureRmResource -ResourceGroupName MyFirstResourceGroup -ResourceType Microsoft.Sql/servers/databases -ResourceName my2ndsqldb/Ken_Test -ApiVersion 2015-05-01-preview

# SET Ken_Test
$PropertiesObject = @{
#Property = value;
}
Set-AzureRmResource -PropertyObject $PropertiesObject -ResourceGroupName MyFirstResourceGroup -ResourceType Microsoft.Sql/servers/databases -ResourceName my2ndsqldb/Ken_Test -ApiVersion 2015-05-01-preview -Force

# Actions available on that object

# Delete Ken_Test
Remove-AzureRmResource -ResourceGroupName MyFirstResourceGroup -ResourceType Microsoft.Sql/servers/databases -ResourceName my2ndsqldb/Ken_Test -ApiVersion 2015-05-01-preview -Force

These aren’t the Powershell commands I’m used to but are lower level ones associated with the resource manager API, but they do work!

One of the nice things about this page is that if you want to automate something within Azure you can navigate to the object you need, find the command, and off you go. Another is the deep level of information associated with your various Azure objects. For example, the storage associated with your SQL Database.

Here is a nice demo of the resource manager by Scott Hanselman and David Ebbo.