What is Cerebrata?

What is Cerebrata?

Cerebrata is a cross-platform desktop tool for managing the Azure Resources under one roof. It facilitates working on multiple operating systems like Windows, Linux and Mac. Over the last few years, Microsoft has built excellent tooling around different technologies. Today, everything is available in one place – the Azure Portal. With Cerebrata, these Azure technologies can be efficiently managed and maintained across various platforms.

Why Cerebrata?

There are different tools available in the market to provide management capabilities for the Azure Integrations. Here are the vital reasons why a user should choose Cerebrata for managing the Azure Resources

Resource Categorization

Cerebrata has a unique feature where user can assign a "category", e.g. "Dev", "QA" or "Prod" to a resource and group them based on their category for hassle-free management of those resources.
User can view resources based on:

1. Resource Type (Default): Resources are grouped based on type, for example all storage accounts will be grouped under "Storage Accounts" type.
2. Resource Category: Resources are grouped based on category, for example all resources under the "Dev" category will be grouped.
3. Resource Category & Type: Resources are grouped based on category and then type.
4. No Grouping: Resources are not grouped and appear as it is.

Resource level Permissions

Cerebrata has a distinct feature of setting permissions on a resource to prevent accidental deletes and updates. These permissions are specific to Cerebrata and open up a resource with specified permissions. The following permissions can be applied on a resource:

1. Read-Only: Resources are opened in read-only mode and user cannot perform any updation or deletion operations on the resource.
2. Read Write: Resources are opened in read-write mode and only read and update operations can be performed on the resource. Delete operations are blocked.
3. Full (Default): Resources are opened in read-write-delete mode and all operations can be performed on the resource.

Tasks

The Task is another unique feature of Cerebrata where long-running operations like blob uploads, downloads etc. are executed via out-of-process background tasks so that the impact on the UI from these tasks will be minimal.
Cerebrata can keep these tasks running even after it has terminated so that users don't have to keep the application running to execute long-running operations.
User can monitor the progress of these tasks, view detailed logs collected by these tasks, cancel tasks or even resubmit the tasks if they fail.

Customization

Cerebrata is highly customizable. The user can customize almost every aspect of the application according to their preferences.
Some examples of customization features available are:

1. Ability to view date/time in local or UTC.
2. Ability to customize upload/download behaviour like upload block size, compression/decompression settings.
3. Ability to view Redis Cache keys in a hierarchical format.

Cross OS compatibility

Cerebrata is a cross-platform, i.e. it runs on Windows, Mac & Linux and has support for managing the Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Search Service, Redis Cache and Azure Service Bus accounts.

Azure Services supported by Cerebrata

Azure Storage

Manage blob storage (containers & blobs), file storage (shares & files), queue storage (queues & messages), and table storage (tables & entities) in your Azure Storage

Azure Cosmos DB

Manage database, containers, stored procedures, triggers, user-defined functions and data in accounts targeting SQL API, Gremlin API and Table API.

Redis Cache

Manage databases, and keys in your Azure Redis Cache accounts through a user interface or in-built console.

Azure Service Bus

Manage queues, topics, subscriptions and messages in your Service Bus accounts. Also, perform basic management operations on the accounts.

Cognitive Search

Manage indexes, data sources, indexers, synonyms and data in the Azure Cognitive Search accounts.

Subscription

Connect to the Azure Subscriptions using Work/Personal account and perform basic management operations on the supported resources. Also, launch Cloud Shell and Portal from inside the application.

Hope you will find Cerebrata useful!