Last year at the //Build conference we launched the Azure Cloud Shell in the Azure portal, providing our users with a cloud-native command-line environment from any device, anywhere in the world. Over the last year, we've seen incredible adoption, with thousands of users logging in every day.

We've added some incredible integrations that make Cloud Shell even more powerful. We added automatic authorization for pre-installed open source tools like Terraform, Ansible, and InSpec. We've also partnered with other Microsoft teams to enable the Try It experiences for Azure and .NET documentation. Additionally, we worked with the Visual Studio Code team to embed Cloud Shell inside of Visual Studio Code and the Azure mobile app team to integrate Cloud Shell into the Azure mobile app for easy access from mobile devices everywhere.

Overall, the feedback we received from our active user base demonstrates the utility and value of Cloud Shell to our users. As we looked at the ways that people are using Cloud Shell, we realized early on that providing our users with easy-to-use choices for managing their cloud infrastructure via the web browser was critical to success.

Since launch, we have provided a variety of editors (vi, emacs, nano) for editing files from Cloud Shell. To bring even more flexibility to how you edit files, today I'm excited to announce the launch of a graphical editor embedded directly in Azure Cloud Shell. Through collaboration with the Visual Studio Code team and their open-source Monaco project, the same web-standards based editor that powers Visual Studio Code is now integrated directly into Cloud Shell.

The Monaco code editor brings features like syntax coloring, auto completion, and code snippets. The new Cloud Shell integration includes a file explorer to easily navigate the Cloud Shell file system for seamless file exploration. This enables a rich editing workflow by simply typing “code .” to open the editor’s file explorer from any Cloud Shell web-based experience.

There's never been a better time to see how a cloud-based DevOps environment can radically change the ease and ubiquity of your interactions with the cloud. Try the new Cloud Shell editing experience today by navigating to shell.azure.com or portal.azure.com and typing “code .”!