Powershell

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how to connect to Azure via PowerShell and a service principal. It’s super useful, and allows us to do things like change the size of a VM. https://www.stephenwuebker.com/2019/05/30/connecting-to-azure-using-azure-powershell-and-a-service-principal/ In our environment, we need to toggle a VM between sizes on a fairly regular basis. Why? Well, because for some weeks of the month, the workload on that VM is high and we need the performance of a more powerful VM. However, during the rest of the month, the workload is relatively low and we don’t need as many resources, so we’ll reduce the size to save money.

Here’s a quick one-liner that I find super-useful. If your processes are anything like mine, you’ve got scripts and/or SSIS packages that are supposed to run at a certain time of the month or maybe a certain day of the week. Right? Perhaps your jobs run and output files. Nothing out of the ordinary. Usually these work fine and everything is good… except for those times when “that guy” is late, and the data your jobs depend on isn’t there on time. So you have to delay your jobs and when you can finally run them, your output files are incorrectly named.

Azure PowerShell provides a cross-platform way to manage your Azure resources without actually having to log in to the portal. Obvious benefits here include being able to script away management tasks and speed up administration tasks by using the command line. Microsoft provides some great documentation and installation instructions here: