Difference between Azure CLI and PowerShell

Question

I am asking this question as Windows user but I request you not to limit the answer for windows only.

I tried executing Azure CLI commands in Power-Shell and they are executing successfully but not the other way around. In that case why do we have 2 separate command sets? Why not just work on Power-Shell? I have only tried some basic commands and they are all working except filter commands | find only works on CLI and | Select only works in Power-Shell.

I know that Azure CLI is for cross platform support. But is there any difference for Windows user? Are there any consequences to run CLI command on Power-Shell?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here are my opinions from using both. In no way am I saying one is better than the other. They both have their pros and cons.

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Azure CLI is cross-platform command-line tool for managing Azure resources, and it can run in Windows, Mac and Linux. This also means it can run on Windows PowerShell. Its more flexible than Azure PowerShell since its a binary and can run inside any OS default shell.

Are there any consequences to run CLI command on Power-Shell?

Updating can be a bit of a pain. If you want to update it on Windows you have to re-install the MSI with the instructions from Install Azure CLI on Windows. Updating is easier on other platforms, and makes me only want to only use Azure PowerShell on Windows PowerShell. A work around is to use WSL on Windows, then you can run Azure CLI on Linux inside a Windows machine. You can install WSL at Windows Subsystem for Linux Installation Guide for Windows 10. I find updating the azure-cli package much easier on Linux using apt-get than the Windows equivalent. You can have a look at Install Azure CLI with apt on how to install the Azure CLI package on Linux.

Another difference is that you have to chain multiple commands with Azure CLI, such as az group list vs Get-AzResourceGroup from Azure PowerShell. You also can't run Get-Help with Azure CLI commands like you do with Azure PowerShell, which is a huge game changer for me, since I find the PowerShell help system to be very helpful displaying in-depth information about PowerShell Cmdlets. The Azure CLI help info is found with az --help, but is not as comprehensive as Get-Help.

Tab completion also doesn't work in Azure CLI when using Windows PowerShell. This makes typing a bit of a pain as well, another reason I use WSL inside of Windows. You can have a look at the other alternatives at this Autocompletion support in Windows command line GitHub issue.

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Azure PowerShell on the other hand is a set of PowerShell Cmdlets for managing Azure resources from the command-line, and only works in Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core. This also means that if another OS such as Mac or Linux is running PowerShell Core, then it can run Azure PowerShell as well.

I have only tried some basic commands and they are all working except filter commands | find only works on CLI and | Select only works in Power-Shell.

Select-Object or the shorthand Select is a PowerShell Cmdlet, so it only works on PowerShell objects. find can search a string or text file. Furthermore, if you are searching for data from Azure CLI, you should use the --query parameter instead of find, since find is limited to searching strings inside text. Azure CLI uses the JMESPath query language to search for data inside the JSON output you receive. If your comfortable with this query language then searching for data using Azure CLI shouldn't be too much of an issue. Additionally, you can also use Azure CLI commands inside PowerShell scripts, but not vice-versa.

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Summary

If you deal with multiple platforms or want to write scripts with others that use different platforms, using Azure CLI is a good choice. However, if you mainly deal with Windows systems and work with others who do so as well, then using Azure PowerShell is a good idea. If your like me and have to use different platforms, then installing both is a good idea. If you still just want to use Azure PowerShell on different OS platforms, then you need PowerShell Core.

For simple tasks, like quickly looking up resources in cloud shell or writing quick scripts, Azure CLI is good to use and less verbose than Azure PowerShell. If you already use bash a lot, this will feel more natural, and adding Azure CLI commands to existing scripts will be a simple task. As others have also said, there is nothing stopping you from adding Azure CLI commands to powershell scripts, which allows you to deserialize the JSON output using ConvertFrom-Json into a PSCustomObject.

For more complex tasks, Azure PowerShell is preferable, since working with .NET objects/OOP principals is much easier than parsing the JSON text given from Azure CLI. This is one reason I try to use Azure PowerShell when I can.

Azure CLI does benefit from being idempotent, so running the same command against the resources won't require any null checking like in Azure PowerShell. If this becomes an issue, then you can run ARM templates in Azure PowerShell, which are idempotent.

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Update

As @AimusSage helpfully pointed out in the comments, PowerShell 7.0 has recently been released, replacing the name PowerShell Core or PowerShell 6.x. You can read more at Announcing PowerShell 7.0.

Another Idea

If you want to maintain OOP principals from Azure PowerShell, but use something that is easier for Linux Sys Admins to use, then you can consider using the Azure SDK for Python. I have used this in the past when I wanted to run scripts in a Linux host, but didn't want to use Azure CLI or install PowerShell.

Answer 2

I like the previous answers, I just want to add a different point of view for people in the enterprise world that is forced to pick one:

In that case why do we have 2 separate command sets? Why not just work on Power-Shell?

Rephrasing: Both Az CLI and Az PowerShell just call the same set of APIs, the Azure APIs. This is important because theoretically and eventually you will be able to do everything in both ways

So why did Microsoft creates and maintains two ways of doing the same thing?

Martin Fowler ones said: but remember, the skill of the team will outweigh any monolith/microservice choice

If you change the monolith/microservice by PowerShell/Bash then this answers the question.

I believe that there are people with decades of development of systems using Bash, and there are other teams that are heavy users of PowerShell. Microsoft does not want them to have to learn a whole new programming language to be able to use Azure.

Summary:

If your team is familiar with PowerShell, go with PowerShell and do as much native PowerShell stuff as possible. This way you benefit from things like error handling, OOP concepts,environment settings, parallelization, etc

If yout team are linux admins, heavy users of jenkins, with million lines of Bash to automate other things already there, and working with Bash for their entire life, go with CLI and keep consistency across all the already built tools