PowerShell changes for the Resource Manager and classic deployment models

Chapter 8, “Management tools,” talks about some of the tools available to use with Azure, including the Azure PowerShell cmdlets and the Azure CLI.

One of the other changes made when the Azure team created the Resource Manager model was to create PowerShell cmdlets that work just for the Resource Manager model. They did this by appending “Rm” to “Azure” in the name of the cmdlets. For example, to create a classic storage account, you would use the New-AzureStorageAccount cmdlet. To create a Resource Manager storage account, you would use the New-AzureRmStorageAccount cmdlet.

Microsoft did this so you could easily tell which kind of resource you were creating. Also, this ensures that scripts that are currently being used will continue to work. Each time you deploy a Resource Manager resource, you have to specify the resource group into which it should be placed. Also, some of the cmdlets for Resource Manager (such as creating a VM) have more details than their counterparts in the classic model.

One last note: for storage accounts, the only PowerShell cmdlets impacted are on the control plane, such as those for creating a storage account, listing storage accounts, removing a storage account, and so on. All of the PowerShell cmdlets used to access the actual objects in storage—blobs, tables, queues, and files—remain unchanged. So once you are pointed to the right storage account, you’re good to go.