There are some awesome folks out there who share their hard efforts so the rest of us can have an easier job. A few of these that have been really useful sit around work against the REST APIs of key Azure services.

My days of day in day out development are over so I find a lot of my automation “glue” mashing up deployments relies on PowerShell with the odd bit of CLI. Most is a little bit of scaffolding to deploy ARM templates but occasionally a requirement to work with the data plane of a resource appears and I have to resort to manual config.

ARM Template support for configuring resources is always improving but due to timing this isn’t always possible. Sometimes it is really helpful to understand what is going on, and sometimes the only option is REST.

For the latter I thoroughly recommend POSTMAN if you need to interact, though Azure is also improving native API exploring support. I discovered POSTMAN through an azure Friday video with Steven Lindsay who has some really really useful modules on GitHub. This is really helpful for CosmosDB (Documentdb as it was) and really helped me debug some Gremlin issues.

Next is the PowerShell module for CosmosDB which sits over REST and as well as being an awesome example of the kind is also a really helpful module for checking interactions with CosmosDB.

And finally an excellent post by Michał Pawlikowski on connecting to Azure Data Lake Storage with REST API with PowerShell, showing awesome detective work and publishing a bunch of really useful cmdlets.