{"id":503,"date":"2016-03-29T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T17:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/pythonengineering\/?p=503"},"modified":"2019-02-17T15:27:10","modified_gmt":"2019-02-17T22:27:10","slug":"azure-python-sdk-2-0-0-is-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/python\/azure-python-sdk-2-0-0-is-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Azure Python SDK 2.0.0rc2 is out! Why it’s a major step for Azure with Python."},"content":{"rendered":"

My name is Laurent and I recently moved from France to join the Python team at Microsoft. Along with the rest of our team, I am responsible for maintaining the Azure Python SDK, and we are glad to announce the 2.0.0 RC2 version! This is a major step for Python on\u00a0Azure and the product of several teams collaborating in Microsoft to establish a solid foundation for the future of the Python SDK. This post will give you an idea of what you can expect of this release.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let’s go back in the past, when the 0.x versions<\/a> of\u00a0the\u00a0Azure Python SDK were released using the\u00a0Azure Service Management<\/a>\u00a0API (a.k.a. ASM). This Python SDK was written by hand against each Azure service. Moreover, ASM was not strict on the URL\u00a0and answer format of the REST API. For instance, some services handled only JSON, some others XML or Atom\/XML format. It was very difficult to work in this situation to be able to scale the SDK as fast as Azure grew up. Because of these issues you needed to use C# to be on the edge of the latest Azure features.<\/p>\n

The new Azure Resource Management<\/a> (a.k.a ARM) REST API is built over a more common approach for each Azure service. Each service is\u00a0associated with a provider<\/a> and you can group several service components into a resource group. This also allows you to deploy any service using a JSON template<\/a>. And since this internally uses the same REST APIs, every new service has automatic template support. The ARM template website<\/a> is a gold mine for every Azure addict.<\/p>\n

Since ARM is a common framework, which comes with a stronger model — URL patterns and HTTP responses are more consistent\u00a0than ASM — it’s now possible to describe a meta-model of each service REST API, and then use this meta-model to generate the SDK. The first attempt gave the Azure Python SDK 1.x series<\/a>, but it was not powerful enough and was abandoned.<\/p>\n

From this first experiment, we learned and chose to use the Swagger format<\/a> to describe all our REST API models<\/a>. We also decided, at Microsoft, to create our own Swagger based code generator, called Autorest<\/a>, to have the flexibility we wanted to provide the best SDK for our users. Obviously Autorest is Open Source!<\/p>\n

The really important point here is that now, every <\/strong>SDK (even C#) will use the generator to build their SDK. Autorest is indeed capable of generation of C#, Python, Java, Ruby, NodeJS and soon PHP.\u00a0Autorest is available in Visual Studio (as a reminder, don’t forget that Visual Studio is Python friendly<\/a>) or\u00a0can be run easily on Linux using Mono<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What about Python specifically?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Azure Python SDK 2.0.0 RC2 is the first Python release from Autorest. It provides supports for<\/p>\n