Executing commands and scripts on a VM within the Azure portal

At times you may need to run a script or a command to retrieve resources or create new resources. Rather than having to SSH or RDP into your server, you can easily run these commands or scripts right from the Azure Portal.

Pre-requisites;
1) An Azure account
2) A Linux VM, Windows VM, or preferably both.
3) Knowledge of Bash and PowerShell (I will explain the cmdlets and shell scripts that I'm running)

First thing you want to do is go to your Resource Group within Azure and head over to your VMs.

(For the Linux portion) Click on your Linux and in the left pane scroll down to "Run command".

Once you click on "Run command", you'll see two options. RunShellScript and ifconfig. Choose RunShellScript.

Once you're there, you can run whatever script or bash line you'd like.

Similarly, we can do the same on a Windows machine. If you set up a Windows Server, head over to your Windows Server and find the "Run command" option in the same place as the Linux VM.

We'll see a few more options here then we saw in the Linux VM. Let's choose "RunPowerShellScript".

This is quite useful if you need to run a script or a line of code against one machine to ensure something exists or you know you need to install something one time. I wouldn't recommend using this for something like running a script on 5 different machines. This is more for one-off checks/installs.

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DevOps tooling in the Microsoft realm

When I really started to dive into automation and practicing DevOps with specific tooling, there were a few key players. At the time Microsoft was not one of them. They were just starting to embrace the open source world, including the art and practice of DevOps. Since then Microsoft has went all in and the tech giant has made some incredible tooling. Recently I switched to a Microsoft-heavy environment and I love it. I went from AWS/Python/Ansible/Jenkins to Azure/PowerShell/ARM/Azure DevOps. My first programming language was PowerShell so being back in the saddle allowed me to do a full circle between all of the different types of tooling in both worlds. Today I want to share some of that tooling with you.

The first thing I want to talk about is ARM. What is ARM? ARM is a configuration management tool that allows you to perform software-defined-infrastructure. Much like Ansible and Terraform, ARM allows you to define what you want your environment to look like at scale. With ARM, yo…

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Pre-reqs;
1. Intermediate knowledge of Kubernetes
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Run PowerShell code with Ansible on a Windows Host

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Pre-requisites for this post:
1) WinRM set up to connect to your Windows host from Ansible
2) Ansible set up for Windows Remote Management
3) SSH access to the Ansible host
4) Proper firewall rules to allow WinRM (port 5985) access from your Ansible host to your Windows host
5) Hosts file set up in Ansible that has your IP or hostname of your Windows Server.
6) At least one Linux host running Ansible and one Windows Server host …

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