Azd

azd, short for Azure Developer CLI, is a cross-platform command-line tool from Microsoft designed to streamline the development and deployment of cloud-native applications to Microsoft Azure. It provides guided workflows, templates, and automation to create, provision, and deploy an application and its cloud infrastructure from a single interface. The goal is to reduce boilerplate configuration and keep local development, testing, and production deployments aligned.

The tool introduces a project manifest and environment concept that describe the application, required Azure resources, and deployment steps. Developers scaffold a new project with azd init (or equivalent workflow), configure environments such as dev and prod, and then provision resources and deploy the app with a few commands. The underlying infrastructure is defined using infrastructure-as-code templates (for example, Bicep or Terraform) and can include compute, storage, databases, and identity components.

azd emphasizes a dev-to-cloud workflow, enabling local development against cloud services when possible and providing automated provisioning to Azure. It is open source and maintained by Microsoft with community contributions, and the project home on GitHub hosts templates, extensions, and documentation. While designed for Azure, azd aims to be extensible through templates and extensions to support a range of stacks and Azure services.

Limitations include its Azure focus and ongoing evolution; users must have an active Azure subscription and sufficient permissions to provision resources.