I don't want to have to look up the commands every time I want to run a thing I do once a month, quarter or year. I just want to click a button that doesn't take 20 fucking seconds to load and isn't buried amongst a ton of useless menu items.
The joke in our office is that the Azure team gave the portal interface to the interns to do. It's a UI that's poorly thought out, poorly programmed and massively unresponsive.
It's so obviously been conceived of by a programmer who is inappropriately obsessed with their "innovative" modular design.
But a CLI? Certain types of people with amazing memories like CLIs, but please don't inflict them on the rest of us. They're shit. AWS's portal is good enough, but Azure's is rubbish.
The joke in MS offices that use the portal UX is often that it was a UI designed by Designers, or at least by someone who only ever saw screenshots of the UX in a powerpoint.
It's not much comfort, but know at least that the internal engineers feel the pain as much as you do and would love to see improvement in that area, but right now there seems to be a surprising amount of likely political willpower pushing its use against informed resistance. I make this post largely to encourage you to keep speaking up about the pain of the UI, since many of us certainly are internally.
The Node CLI is pretty good. Almost does everything the Powershell CLI does and works across platforms.
Their web portal is a lot better after they moved to the new "preview" one. The classic portal was pretty bad, but their transition from the classic to the new portal was even worse. There was a time period where certain operations were only available in the classic portal and other services were only available in the new portal. The transition took many, many months (maybe a year) and the new portal was initially very slow.
If you look at Google Cloud's and AWS admin portal, they are not really any better. Probably is a result of these cloud providers providing so many services, it's hard to organize it all. The others have faults also. For example, I hate how AWS does their form validation when creating new resources. You don't even know what's wrong until after clicking "submit" / "create", azure is more single page app like. With AWS, if the service you are creating requires a dependent resource like an s3 bucket for logging, you have to go create that dependency first. With Azure, you can choose to use an existing dependent resources or create new ones all in a single operation. There also seems to be less organization in AWS. With Azure, I like how Azure does their directory structure of sub panes. You can view all services at once with particular ordering like datacenter region or drill into a particular resource group or service type. With AWS, you always have to go to that particular service's "website" whether S3 or DynamoDB, etc.
