Managing Storage in the Azure independent clouds using PowerShell

Most people use Azure Public Cloud for their global Azure deployment. There are also some independent deployments of Azure for reasons of sovereignty and so on. These independent deployments are referred to as "environments." The following list details the independent clouds currently available.

• Azure Government Cloud
• Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet
• Azure German Cloud

Using an independent cloud

To use Azure Storage in one of the independent clouds, you connect to that cloud instead of Azure Public. To use one of the independent clouds rather than Azure Public:

• You specify the environment to which to connect.
• You determine and use the available regions.
• You use the correct endpoint suffix, which is different from Azure Public.

The examples require Azure PowerShell module Az version 0.7 or later. In a PowerShell window, run Get-Module -ListAvailable Az to find the version. If nothing is listed, or you need to upgrade, see Install Azure PowerShell module.

Log in to Azure

Run the Get-AzEnvironment cmdlet to see the available Azure environments:

Get-AzEnvironment

Sign in to your account that has access to the cloud to which you want to connect and set the environment. This example shows how to sign into an account that uses the Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet.

Connect-AzAccount -Environment AzureChinaCloud

At this point, if you need the list of locations to create a storage account or another resource, you can query the locations available for the selected cloud using Get-AzLocation.

Get-AzLocation | select Location, DisplayName

The following table shows the locations returned for the China cloud.

Endpoint suffix

The endpoint suffix for each of these environments is different from the Azure Public endpoint. For example, the blob endpoint suffix for Azure Public is blob.core.windows.net. For the China Cloud, the blob endpoint suffix is blob.core.chinacloudapi.cn.

Get endpoint using Get-AzEnvironment

Retrieve the endpoint suffix using Get-AzEnvironment. The endpoint is the StorageEndpointSuffix property of the environment.

The following code snippets show how to retrieve the endpoint suffix. All of these commands return something like "core.chinacloudapi.cn". Append the suffix to the storage service to access that service. For example, "queue.core.chinacloudapi.cn" will access the queue service in China Cloud.

This code snippet retrieves all of the environments and the endpoint suffix for each one.

Get-AzEnvironment | select Name, StorageEndpointSuffix 

This command returns the following results.

To retrieve all of the properties for the specified environment, call Get-AzEnvironment and specify the cloud name. This code snippet returns a list of properties; look for StorageEndpointSuffix in the list. The following example is for the China Cloud.

Get-AzEnvironment -Name AzureChinaCloud 

The results are similar to the following values:

To retrieve just the storage endpoint suffix property, retrieve the specific cloud and ask for just that one property.

$environment = Get-AzEnvironment -Name AzureChinaCloud
Write-Host "Storage EndPoint Suffix = " $environment.StorageEndpointSuffix

This command returns the following information:

Storage Endpoint Suffix = core.chinacloudapi.cn

Get endpoint from a storage account

You can also examine the properties of a storage account to retrieve the endpoints:

# Get a reference to the storage account.
$resourceGroup = "myexistingresourcegroup"
$storageAccountName = "myexistingstorageaccount"
$storageAccount = Get-AzStorageAccount `
  -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup `
  -Name $storageAccountName 
  # Output the endpoints.
Write-Host "blob endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.Blob 
Write-Host "file endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.File
Write-Host "queue endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.Queue
Write-Host "table endpoint = " $storageAccount.PrimaryEndPoints.Table

For a storage account in the China Cloud, this command returns the following output:

blob endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.blob.core.chinacloudapi.cn/
file endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.file.core.chinacloudapi.cn/
queue endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.queue.core.chinacloudapi.cn/
table endpoint = http://myexistingstorageaccount.table.core.chinacloudapi.cn/

After setting the environment

You can now use PowerShell to manage your storage accounts and access blob, queue, file, and table data. For more information, see Az.Storage.

Clean up resources

If you created a new resource group and a storage account for this exercise, you can remove both assets by deleting the resource group. Deleting the resource group deletes all resources contained within the group.

Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name $resourceGroup

Next steps

• Persisting user logins across PowerShell sessions
• Application Developer Notes for Azure operated by 21Vianet