If you are one of the many users of our Windows Azure Powershell cmdlets or our Windows Azure command line tool, then you know that the CLI makes it really easy to manage and deploy Websites, Mobile Services, VMs, Service Bus and much more in Windows Azure from your favorite shell prompt on Windows, Mac and Linux.

That’s not all you can do though, you can do much more! You can take our tools and use them in your favorite scripts as part of your automation infrastructure. Or you can use them right from within your favorite development environments.

Below is a bunch posts both the community and our team talking about this Azure automation goodness.

General scripting

These posts cover the basis of scripting from different shell environments.

• Simple bash scripting for “azure” cli. In this post I show you how you can use tools like grep and awk to pipe together azure commands in your scripts.
• Simple Powershell scripting with Azure Powershell cmdlets. In this post I show you can compose our cmdlets using the pipeline in your Powershell scripts.

Scripting Mobile Services

In this mini-series of scripting posts, Josh Twist from the Mobile Services team shows you how to use the CLI to automate tasks related to Mobile Services.

• Getting started with the CLI and backing up your scripts. In this first post, Josh Twist from the Mobile Services team shows you how to download and backup your scripts
• More CLI – changing your Mobile Services workflow. Josh takes automation for scripting one step further this time writing a daemon which monitors a folder while you are editing scripts and automatically uploads them as changes happen.
• A Mobile Services Log Watcher. Josh shows you to create a local log watcher which polls mobile services for logs and writes any new entries to the console.

Virtual Machines (Powershell only)

Michael Washam has a great ongoing series of posts so how to use the Powershell cmdlets.

• Migrate a Virtual Machine to Windows Azure with Powershell. In this post, Michael Washam shows how you can script migrating and provisioning a virtual machine.
• Deploying certificates with Windows Azure Virtual Machines and PowerShell. Michael shows how you can create and deploy certificates for both Windows and Linux VMs!
• Publishing and Synchronizing Web Farms using Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Michael shows how to deploy a web farm of Azure VMs that you can publish to using Visual Studio Web Deploy and keep synchronized via Powershell scripts.

Using the CLI within your favorite development environments

In this set of posts you’ll see how as a developer you can use our tools from within IDEs including Visual Studio, PHP Storm and Cloud 9.

• Working with Windows Azure from within PHP storm. Maarten Balliauw from Jet Brains shows you how to setup the azure CLI from within Jet Brains PHP Storm or Web Storm
• Using the Azure CLI from within Cloud 9. In this post, C9 folks show you can install the “azure” cli right from the terminal within Cloud 9. Once you have it the full world of Azure is open to you right from the browser.
• Working with Windows Azure Command Line tools from Visual Studio. Maarten shows you how to use the Windows Azure Powershell cmdlets in Visual Studio.
• Using the Windows Azure CLI on Windows and from within Visual Studio. Sandrino Di Mattia shows you to use the azure CLI in Visual Studio

As you can see, there are some great things you can do automating the cloud using the command line tools in your scripts.

@gblock