Steps

Pretty easy!

Create Azure Storage account and get access token
Upload our PowerShell script etc. to Azure Storage
Create an Azure Function to run our script daily

Set up Azure Storage

OK, we're assuming a basic level of Azure-understanding here, like setting up a subscription, resource group, etc.!

Find Azure Storage and create a new storage account, pick a unique storage account name.

Note: This will be part of your podcast feed URL so try make it easy for yourself! The other options won't matter much unless you expect high traffic volumes!

Next, networking tab, keep these all default

Same with Data protection tab, i.e. nothing enabled, and under Advanced I left everything default as well - just make sure public access to blobs is enabled.

Once you've created your storage account, create two new containers: 'public' (where your podcast feed will go), and 'scraper' (where your script & assets will go for the Azure Function)

Azure Storage Permissions

Now, we need to create a shared access signature so that your script is able to modify the contents of this container. There's a few ways you can do this

access key for the storage account
SAS token & URL to the container
SAS token & URLto a specific file
or a service principal.

This isn't a full discussion of the pros, cons and how-to's of permission models on Azure, but a 2 second explanation is "these are listed in descending order of ease of setting up, and ascending order of security/best practice".

Because this isn't a production app for one of my Fortune-50 clients (haha, I jest), we can just do a SAS token & URL to the specific file (podcast.xml). I'll upload podcast-example.xml and podcast.xml from this repo, and then generate the SAS token & URL for podcast.xml, with read/write permissions.

Now, I copied the SAS URI and put it in a file sas-uri.token. I've ensured that *.token is in my .gitignore so I don't inadvertently push this to my public repo too!

We're just doing this for testing at the moment as we'll move the token to Azure Key Vault - one of the advantages of using Azure Functions!

Test!!

Update the parameters of the Get-Podcast script to include your Azure Storage URL and SAS URI

Run the script in a local PowerShell window, and (if you've done everything right), your podcast.xml in Azure should now be updated with a properly formatted podcast RSS feed.

.\Get-Podcasts.ps1
Retrieving podcasts from 'https://www.website-url-to-scrape.com/podcasts'
Parsed 23 episodes.
Building podcast feed XML
Done exporting podcast feed XML
Pushing podcast feed XML to blob storage

Test your podcast XML on a site like CastFeed Validator and make sure its validating OK before moving onto the next step.

Azure Function

Again, assuming basic knowledge here!

Create a new Function App in Azure. You can do this inside VS Code, but I'll throw up some quick screenshots of doing it in Azure Portal.

STOP.

It's at this point that I realised a few things:

You can't run an Azure Function using "full" PowerShell (or "Desktop" PowerShell, whatever it's called. Not cool, cross platform, "PowerShell Core") - as far as I could see.
My original script relied heavily on Invoke-WebRequest and the ParsedHtml property of that object, which is not available in PowerShell Core, as it uses Internet Explorer's engine.
There's some hacky solutions copying some MSIE DLL's around, but :\
This needs a new blog post. Who doesn't like blog series??

So, here's the repo with the original v1 script. You can throw this up on a Windows or just run it on a Scheduled Task from your own computer.

I promised Cloud though, so stay tuned for the next blog post which will cover converting this to run in PSCore and in an Azure Function!