Those who have configured Rule Collections for a Azure Firewall Policy whether via GUI or scripting will know how tedious the task can be due to the amount of time for any type of change to be applied and the non-parallel stream of updates you can push to the firewall. I’ve also noticed that attempting to use multiple browser windows to copy and apply changes can potentially overwrite changes to the configuration. Case in point, I had a negative experience where I had window #1 to copy similar rule collections to window #2, and everything went as planned as long as I only saved to window #2. However, if I were to make a change in window #1 where it had not been refreshed with the changes applied to window #2, the save operation would overwrite the changes I made in window #2. I lost quite a bit of configuration due to this scenario.
To minimize the mistakes and amount of time I spent staring at the Azure Firewall Policy window and slowly applying configuration updates one at a time, I decide to spend a bit of time to create PowerShell scripts to reference an Excel file with configuration parameters. The first script I created was one that read an Excel spreadsheet to create the list of Rule Collections that are placed under a predefined Rule Collection Group.
The PowerShell script can be found here in my GitHub repository: https://github.com/terenceluk/Azure/blob/main/Azure%20Firewall/Create-NetworkRuleCollection.ps1
The following is a sample spreadsheet for the PowerShell script to read from:
Here is a sample screenshot of the Rule Collections in the Azure management portal:
Hope this helps anyone who may be looking for such a script as the creation of Rule Collections can only be created one at a time.
