The other day I had a random thought.
I wonder if there is a version of Azure Portal for Android.
Turns out there is!
It has a limited number of options available. For example I can’t find any way to create new objects through the GUI. That said if you look in the bottom right corner you will see a cloud shell option and let’s face it, with the right script you can do pretty much anything you want from there.
Now, it does have the option to see information about VMs that I have, and even I can even turn them on or off. Which was what I specifically wanted to do anyway.
Once I’d turned on my VM I noticed the connect option at the bottom. So I hit it.
Remote desktop for Android?!?
That of course got installed. Next time I hit the connect button it sent info to Remote Desktop.
And after say 30 seconds and entering my username and password I was connected!
You have options to either move the mouse around by touching the screen or just go straight to touch screen. Note: I found the touch screen much easier. Given that this is my blog test box I of course have SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) installed. So I opened it up. Then opened up a keyboard.
Not that I’m all that great at typing on my phone keyboard, but this is still pretty cool. Want to make it more usable? Add a Bluetooth keyboard. I haven’t done it myself but I’m betting you can connect a monitor to your phone as well. The phone just became a terminal! I mean who cares how powerful your phone is if it can connect to a massively powerful (or just powerful enough for your purpose) VM?
Now, to add to that, let’s say you have a VM with Azure Data Studio installed and use Jupyter Notebooks to create on-call notebooks. You get a call, open up your phone, connect to the VM, open up the right notebook and run the needed scripts.
On-call without ever leaving your bed!
I love technology!