Automate Azure Deployments with Powershell

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It’s important to start this off by saying that I’m just starting to get serious about powershell and automation. So this is less of a how-to guide, and more of my experience attempting to learn this for myself. I think it’s important to document the process of finding the answer, as much as the answer itself.

Background

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I bought “Powershell for Sysadmins” by Adam Bertram over a year ago, and briefly read through it at the time. However, it’s only recently that I’ve been trying to really dive in. I’ve been working my way through this book chapter by chapter, making progress as I go along. The chapters I’ve been excited about since picking up the book are the chapters on cloud administration in both Azure and AWS. Administering multiple tenants on the Azure GUI has proven to be cumbersome for me over the last couple of years, and I’ve been eager to learn some way to automate it. I have used the AZ module in the past, but only for one-off tasks, and not with any consistency. I’ve also used the ExchangeOnline module multiple times as well, but mostly just for migrations. I’ve run into issues early on, and figured this would be the perfect process to docment for any others that would like to learn the same.

Beginnings

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Bertram starts the chapter by showing how to set up a “service principal” to avoid having to enter our credentials every time we run a script. This is necessary for automation, as it will allow scripts to run without user input. However, following Adam’s instructions leads to an error. It turns out that this command is no longer supported. Unfortunately, on my first night of trying, I was unable to reach a conclusion. The issue occurs because the command “New-AzADApplication” no longer accepts a password as a parameter.

That will start it off. I really don’t have much information at this time. Just wanted to kick this off. Grammar and writing should be imroved. Code examples should also be added.