ShellR: a Web based PowerShell running on Azure

Last weekend, a colleague (Bob Maes) and I participated in a programming contest of Azug (the Belgium Azure user group). The goal was to develop a cloud application running on Windows Azure. We choose to develop a web application that offers a web based Powershell to remotely control servers from anywhere in the world; no client side installation is required, an HTML5 compatible web browser is sufficient. Server side we only require a small daemon to be installed that will communicate with our backend using the Azure Servicebus.

We got quite some requests from people who were interested in watching a demo online. So we found some time this week to record it.

ShellR is build using a number of modern web frameworks, a brief summary:

• SignalR for 2-way communication between the browser and the webserver
• Knockout.js to keep our JavaScript code clean
• Azure ACS for SSO authentication with Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, etc.
• Azure Servicebus to connect remote servers to our backend

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have questions, remarks or just find it cool!