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Comment by pletnes | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe is that some Azure stuff seems to be available only through powershell, which is hard to install and configure (I think) in certain corporate policy-infested environments.

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The Az PowerShell module just uses HTTP APIs, so anything they do can be done with other tooling if you really want to.

(There’s also the Az CLI tool, which I don’t like as much as the Az PowerShell module but might be easier to manage in an environment like that.)

Yes, true, they call APIs. But for whatever reason, MS decided that instead of documenting those APIs they went on the route of abstracting them in PS modules or the az-cli submodules that its mind boggling.

The REST API is documented. Maybe not completely so, but mostly.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/

Actually Azure CLIs are kind of schizophrenic, in typical MS fashion.

You have Azure Powershel Cmdlets (the old 5.1 based, and the new Powershell Core based), AZ CLI (in Python), AZD CLI (in Go).

The only one that offers full power is actually the AZ CLI one, e.g. some Kubernetes features aren't exposed in the others.

Yeah - and a number of Azure/O365 Powershell modules have long been deprecated. The promise of 1:1 Graph API replacements has failed to materialize for years now.

Is this a case of programming languages > shell scripts, or REST APIs the LCD?

The Azure CLI [0] is a viable method of managing Azure infrastructure if you don't/cannot use PowerShell.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/what-is-azure-cl...

If it exists in Powershell, it is backed by a REST API. Lots of AZ SDK's include a helper method to make calling the API's easier (like az rest cli command or invoke-azrestmethod).

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