Azure includes an excellent feature called the Azure Cloud Shell. This is an integrated terminal in the Azure portal (portal.azure.com) that you can use with bash and PowerShell, to work with your resources. We will, of course, concentrate on PowerShell in this book. The following screenshot shows PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell in action. The version that is currently used is using a Server Core container as you can see from the output of $PSVersionTable.

At the time of writing this book, PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell is delivered as Windows PowerShell in a Windows Server 2016 Core container, which you can use to manage your resources. In the future, this will be replaced by PowerShell Core. To help you with resource management, you can also store data in the cloud shell. A 5 GB drive is mapped with a symbolic link inside of your $home directory, called clouddrive as you can see in the following screenshot.

You can use the cloud drive to store your scripts, cloned Git repositories, and whatever else needs storing. You will have access to the standard PowerShell cmdlets with WMF5.1, to do what needs to be done.