If you are working with Azure, you need to check out the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets.

powerful + simple = AWESOME !

Here are a few very simple samples that I use to manage my Azure VMs. (There are Cmdlets to cover all of the Azure features and I’ll cover managing Cloud Services in a separate post.)

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Figure: “Get-AzureVM“. It lets you easily see what VMs you currently have provisioned (i.e. Are being charged for).

 

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Figure: The Stop command let’s you de-provision a VM so you aren’t charged for it while you aren’t using it. I schedule this to run on each of my dev VMs.
        No more $200 Azure bills for me because I forgot to shut down my large instance !

 

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Figure: Of course you can start your VMs as well.

 

In case you weren’t sold… here is a list of a few of my other favourites.

Add-AzureWebRole

Restart-AzureVM

Add-AzureWorkerRole

Restart-AzureWebsite

Get-AzureRole (List your roles)

Set-AzureDeployment

Get-AzureService (List cloud services)

Set-AzureRole (Sets the # of instances)

Get-AzureStorageBlob

Set-AzureService

Get-AzureVM (Get VM info)

Show-AzurePortal

Get-AzureWebsite

Show-AzureWebsite

Get-AzureWebsiteDeployment

Start-AzureVM

Get-AzureWebsiteLocation

Start-AzureWebsite

Move-AzureDeployment (staging->prod!)

Stop-AzureVM

New-AzureVM

Stop-AzureWebsite

New-AzureWebsite

  

 

For more info:

Check out MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj156055.aspx