June 12th, 2016

Managing Azure Government Subscriptions with PowerShell

Zach Kramer
Corporate Vice President

**Update – 10-26-2016 – We have added this content to our Azure Gov Documentation.  Check the documentation for the latest content.

**Update – 6-24-2016 – Added command for connecting to Azure Active Directory (AAD) in Azure Gov**

Whether you are using Azure PowerShell to manage a large subscription through script or access features that are not currently available in the Azure Portal you will need to connect to Azure Government instead of Azure Public.  If you have used PowerShell in Azure Public, it is mostly the same.  The differences in Azure Government are:

  • Connecting your account
  • Region names

If you have not used PowerShell yet check out the Introduction to Azure PowerShell.

Connecting to Azure Government

When you start PowerShell you have to tell Azure PowerShell to connect to Azure Government by specifying an environment parameter.  The parameter will ensure that PowerShell is connecting to all of the correct endpoints (for more details see ‘Going Deeper’).  The collection of endpoints is determined when you connect log into your account.  Different APIs require different versions of the environment switch:

Service Management commands:

Add-AzureAccount -Environment AzureUSGovernment

Resource Management commands:

Add-AzureRmAccount -EnvironmentName AzureUSGovernment

Azure Active Directory commands:

Connect-MsolService -AzureEnvironment UsGovernment

Note: Add-AzureRmAccount uses the EnvironmentName switch instead of Environment.

You may also use the Environment switch when connecting to a storage account using New-AzureStorageContext and specify AzureUSGovernment.

Determining Region

Once you are connected there is one additional difference – The regions used to target a service.  Every Azure cloud has different regions.  You can see them listed on the service availability page.   You normally use the region in the Location parameter for a command.

There is one catch.  The Azure Government regions need to be formatted slightly differently from the way they are listed for the PowerShell commands:

  • US Gov Virginia = USGov Virginia
  • US Gov Iowa = USGov Iowa

Note that there is no space between US and Gov when using the Location Parameter.

If you ever want to validate the available regions in Azure Government you can run the following commands and it will print the current list:

Get-AzureLocation

If you are curious about the available environments across Azure, you can run:

Get-AzureEnvironment

References

If you are looking for more information you can check out the following:

Going Deeper

As I was looking into making some changes for new features in Azure Government I dug into how the environment capability works.  I found it interesting and thought I would share.

Since we have the Azure PowerShell code on GitHub you can actually check out the settings in the Azure PowerShell Code.  If you read through the code, you will find that there is basically a table of URLs toward the bottom of this file.  The switch that you pass in to choose and environment.

You can actually add your own Azure Environments using the Set-AzureEnvironment command.  For those you have been working with Azure Government for a while you will recall that originally you had to use this to manually configure the environment.

Another question that comes up – Why does Add-AzureRmAccount use EnvironmentName?  I am not sure why they chose this but the command does have an Environment switch. This takes an Environment variable instead of a string like other commands.  If you wanted to use that switch you would need to do the following:

$envARM = Get-AzureRmEnvironment AzureUSGovernment
Add-AzureRmAccount -Environment $envARM

Final question – How do I use this if I am using the Azure Command Line Interface (CLI) instead of PowerShell.  It is pretty much the same:

azure login –username “name@domain.onmicrosoft.com” –password “password” –environment “AzureUSGovernment”

Author

Zach Kramer
Corporate Vice President

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