The Windows Azure Portal provides a convenient and easy-to-use way of managing the hosted services and storage account in a Windows Azure subscription, as well as any deployments into these hosted services. The Windows Azure Service Management REST API provides a programmatic way of managing the hosted services and storage accounts in a Windows Azure subscription, as well as any deployments into these hosted services. These techniques are complementary and, indeed, it is possible to use the Service Management API to develop an application that provides nearly all the features of the Windows Azure Portal.
The Service Management API provides almost complete control over the hosted services and storage accounts contained in a Windows Azure subscription. All operations using this API must be authenticated using an X.509 management certificate. We see how to do this in the Authenticating against the Windows Azure Service Management REST API recipe in Chapter 1, Controlling Access...