Azure Dev CLI Simplifies Dev Workflows

• Azure Dev CLI, a command-line tool in preview, can speed developer workflows for Azure-based applications.
• It can help manage some Azure costs by guiding developers to deploy and remove resources efficiently, but teams must create custom templates to do so.
• It supports only specific Azure compute services and programming languages.

The Azure Dev CLI, a new command-line interface (CLI) tool separate from the traditional Azure CLI, handles much of the infrastructure setup to do Azure-based development, helping developers focus on implementing business logic rather than tedious Azure configuration details. However, it only supports certain Azure compute services, and while its preview status makes it viable for evaluation, teams should not yet establish practices that depend on it.

Overview

Azure Dev CLI, a tool Microsoft is developing as open-source software and offering as a public preview, aims to reduce Azure configuration complexities for developers. IT administrators use tools such as the Azure portal, PowerShell, and the Azure CLI to manage deployments, but these tools are verbose, can be tedious to use, and have a large learning curve that is usually not the best use of developers’ time. Developers that adopt Azure Dev CLI will likely still have some need for the other tools but with less frequency.