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Limitations of Azure Cloud Shell

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Azure Cloud Shell has the following known limitations:

General limitations

System state and persistence

The machine that provides your Cloud Shell session is temporary, and it's recycled after your session is inactive for 20 minutes. Cloud Shell requires an Azure file share to be mounted. As a result, your subscription must be able to set up storage resources to access Cloud Shell. Other considerations include:

  • With mounted storage, only modifications within the $HOME directory are persisted.
  • Azure file shares can be mounted only from within your assigned region.
    • In Bash, run env to find your region set as ACC_LOCATION.

Browser support

Cloud Shell supports the latest versions of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari. Safari in private mode isn't supported.

Copy and paste

  • Windows: Ctrl+c to copy is supported but use Shift+Insert to paste.
    • FireFox may not support clipboard permissions properly.
  • macOS: Cmd+c to copy and Cmd+v to paste.

Only one shell can be active for a given user

Users can only launch one Cloud Shell session at a time. However, you may have multiple instances of Bash or PowerShell running within that session. Switching between Bash or PowerShell using the menu terminates the existing session and starts a new Cloud Shell instance. To avoid losing your current session, you can run bash inside PowerShell and you can run pwsh inside of Bash.

Usage limits

Cloud Shell is intended for interactive use cases. As a result, any long-running non-interactive sessions are ended without warning.

Bash limitations

User permissions

Permissions are set as regular users without sudo access. Any installation outside your $Home directory isn't persisted.

PowerShell limitations

AzureAD module name

The AzureAD module name is currently AzureAD.Standard.Preview, the module provides the same functionality.

Default file location when created from Azure drive

You can't create files under the Azure: drive. When users create new files using other tools, such as vim or nano, the files are saved to the $HOME by default.

Large Gap after displaying progress bar

When the user performs an action that displays a progress bar, such as a tab completing while in the Azure: drive, it's possible that the cursor isn't set properly and a gap appears where the progress bar was previously.

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