[enhancement]: Enable Credential Caching Across AzurePowerShell@5 Tasks in Azure Pipelines

[emiacepacIG]

Task name

AzurePowerShell@5

Describe your feature request here

In many pipelines, the AzurePowerShell@5 task is used repeatedly—our team often invokes it more than 20 times within a single pipeline. However, each invocation includes the following default cleanup commands::

Clear-AzContext -Scope CurrentUser -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Clear-AzContext -Scope Process

And upon completion, it runs:
Disconnect-AzAccount -Scope CurrentUser -ErrorAction Stop
These operations remove the authentication context and credentials, resulting in a repeated login process for each task. This adds approximately 30 to 45 seconds per task, which can accumulate to 15 minutes or more in pipelines with many AzurePowerShell@5 steps.

Request:

Please consider adding an option to cache credentials across multiple AzurePowerShell@5 tasks within the same pipeline session. This would significantly reduce execution time and improve pipeline efficiency.

Note: While Enable-AzContextAutosave is available, it does not persist the context when the above cleanup commands are executed by default.

Suggested Solution:

Introduce a task-level parameter such as preserveContext: true or reuseCredentials: true that disables the automatic context clearing and disconnection behavior, allowing credential reuse across tasks.

[ChrisGibson1982]

Having it as an true/false option would be amazing