In the new Windows Azure Portal, how does the "Console" Window works? What really happens behind the scenes? I am curious to know how it works internally. (I can't find that out for myself since I don't have an Azure account :-( )
http://assets.andrewconnell.com/media/Default/Misc/AzurePortalManager04.png
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That console looks exacly like the Azure Cross-Platform Command-Line Interface (xplat-cli) which is based on node.js. I'm not a node.js expert, but a good guees would be, that the browser creates a node.js session und runs the xplat-cli in there.
xplat-cli in turn use the Service Management API of Azure, which are all REST-based.
You can compare the xplat-cli on your own by installing them from the Downloads page. At the bottom of this page are the download links for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I actually made this console as my internship project while at Microsoft. It was made before the xplat-cli was available, but it's still very simple and actually uses the Kudu service. Kudu is the engine behind git/hg deployments, WebJobs, and various other features in Azure Web Sites. More information on Kudu here: https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/
When your web application is created on azure, Kudu stands up a scm website for your web application with the end point yoursite.scm.azurewebsites.net. The console then takes commands that you give it, calls Kudu's REST API using the scm website as the endpoint, and then displays you the output in the console.