What's a difference between Azure PowerShell commandlets and Command-Line Tools?

Question

What are the differences between Azure PowerShell Commandlets and Command-Line Tools?

• is there a difference in capabilities?
• are new versions published at around the same time?
• is one of them the 'preferred' way to manage Azure resources?

I am interested in managing web sites, VMs and cloud services from developer's machine and also from Ci server (TeamCity/MSBuild - starting / stopping VMs).

I've noticed that Command-Line Tools is just a small ~5MB download while PowerShell commandlets have several dependencies (~22MB) and June 2013 version still relies on Azure SDK 1.8 October 2012.

Answer 1

The PowerShell cmdlets work only in PowerShell (on Windows machines). They're great for automating several concurrent tasks (i.e. scripting out an entire environment), or carrying out single tasks.

The command-line tools are cross platform tools (work on Windows, Linux, etc.) These are written in node.js. They're not as good for scripting multiple actions, but are great for developers that prefer the command line to execute tasks (instead of going to the Azure management portal).

As far as I can tell, they are not on a synced release schedule. You can follow the progress of each via their github.com repositories (https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat and https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools).