With all the changes in Azure, it is sometimes hard to keep track, that why I thought I will give you a quick update on two exiting things I learned this week. I will show you that Azure Cloud Shell is now already running PowerShell 7 (currently Release Candidate 2) and that you can now deploy Azure Resource Manager Templates to any scope in Azure.

Azure Cloud Shell running PowerShell 7

If you are not familiar with Azure Cloud Shell, it is basically your Microsoft-managed admin machine in Azure, for Azure and even other Microsoft services. Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell.

Azure Cloud Shell runs PowerShell 7

This week I learned that Azure Cloud Shell just got upgraded to PowerShell 7 release candidate 2. This basically means that you can now already try out some of the new features in PowerShell 7, like the new Ternary operator or easier to read error messages and many more features and improvements.

Ternary operator

For example:

condition ? expr1 : expr2

If you want to install and update PowerShell 7 on your local machine, check out the following blog post, and if you want to learn more tricks and tips in Azure Cloud Shell, check out: Mastering Azure with Cloud Shell.

Deploy Azure Resource Manager Templates to any scope in Azure

My eyes caught a tweet by Kristian Nese (Program Manager at Microsoft) this week, where he mentioned new the options to now deploy an Azure Resource Manager template to any scope in Azure. That means you can now also deploy an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template to a subscription, management group, resource group or a tenant.

Alex Frankel (Program Manager at Microsoft) points out that this now allows you to do things like deploying your management group hierarchy, role and policy definitions and assignments to any scope using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

Deploy Azure Resource Manager Templates to any scope in Azure

If you want to learn more about Azure Resource Manager templates, check out the Microsoft Docs: Azure Resource Manager templates overview.

Public Preview of Virtual Network NAT

If you are running virtual machines in Azure you are familiar that handling outbound internet connectivity can be difficult. Virtual Network NAT (network address translation) is a NAT is fully managed and highly resilient service, which simplifies outbound-only Internet connectivity for Azure virtual networks. If you configured Virtual Network NAT on a subnet, all outbound connectivity uses your specified static public IP addresses. For the outbound traffic, there is no need for a load balancer or public IP addresses directly attached to virtual machines.

Virtual Network NAT

If you want to know more about Virtual Network NAT, which is currently in Public Preview, check out the Microsoft Docs.

Use AI to find Azure CLI commands



In case you missed it, we also have a short blog on how Azure CLI uses AI to help you find commands. The az find command provides you with example commands based on Azure documentation and usage patterns of the Azure CLI and Azure Resource Manager users.

Azure CLI

You can find the full blog post here on ITOpsTalk.com.

I hope this short blog post provided you with some interesting news from this week. I know there is much more than just the things I listed here. I recommend that you follow the Azure announcements blog. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.