Azure Nugget: Give the Cloud Shell Timeout a timeout

While the unanimous opinion about the Azure Cloud Shell is that it is a savior, the repeated timeouts (much before the 20 minutes as claimed by Microsoft) is a really off-putting experience.

Oftentimes, I use this shell to remote administer my VMs whose management endpoints (WinRm, SSH, RDP) configured to only one IP address — my current public IP address. Threfore, the Cloud Shell Time out is a really frustrating thing as I have to update all my NSG rules. Even despite all automation, the runtime and the response time of the Azure fabric is enough to make me take multiple naps in a day.

Simple workaround I came up with is to just “keep the session active” by doing watch ls at the shell while performing other tasks.

Of course, Linux machines also have a TMUX session running for long running tasks and disconnected back to cloud shell before executing the “suspend” command.