I am happy to announce the updated release of the Windows Azure Service Management (WASM) Cmdlets for PowerShell today.  With these cmdlets you can effectively automate and manage all your services in Windows Azure.  Specifically,

• Deploy new Hosted Services
  • Automatically upload your packages from the file system to blob storage.
• Upgrade your services
  • Choose between automatic or manual rolling upgrades
  • Swap between staging and production environments
• Remove your Hosted Services
  • Automatically pull down your services at the end of the day to stop billing.  This is a critical need for test and development environments.
• Manage your Storage accounts
  • Retrieve or regenerate your storage keys
• Manage your Certificates
  • Deploy certificates from your Windows store or the local file system
• Configure your Diagnostics
  • Remotely configure the event sources you wish to monitor (Event Logs, Tracing, IIS Logs, Performance Counters and more)
• Transfer your Diagnostics Information
  • Schedule your transfers or Transfer on Demand.

Why did we build this?

The WASM cmdlets were built to unblock adoption for many of our customers as well as serve as a common underpinning to our labs and internal tooling.  There was an immediate demand for an automation API that would fit into the standard toolset for IT Pros.  Given the adoption and penetration of PowerShell, we determined that cmdlets focused on this core audience would be the most effective way forward.  Furthermore, since PowerShell is a full scripting language with complete access to .NET, this allows these cmdlets to be used as the basis for very complicated deployment and automation scripts as part of the application lifecycle.