Cloud for developer companies, first issue: Azure Marketplace - a store of services and solutions for every taste
Our next column of copyrighted articles is called “Cloud for Developer Companies”. In it, we will introduce you to interesting scenarios for using cloud technologies and Microsoft Azure platforms, Office 365 and others to maximize the benefits of professional software development.
The first article will tell you about the Azure Marketplace , which, with the help of Microsoft, provides developers and IT professionals with a convenient way to deploy certified certified solutions and access to third-party cloud services that expand the capabilities of the cloud platform. In addition, the store offers developers from a number of countries (the list will expand) a new sales channel for its solutions in 100+ countries of the world.
Azure Marketplace is a catalog of solutions, services, environment images of various complexity, ready for quick automatic deployment on the Azure platform.
The main idea of the Azure Marketplace is to give an independent developer a sales channel for their solutions around the world, and Azure customers are an easy way to deploy functional solutions in their own infrastructure.
Today, in the Azure Marketplace, you can find dozens of services offered by independent developers that extend the functionality of the Azure cloud. The solutions available in the store are divided into categories: virtual machines, developer services, API Apps, connectors for Azure Active Directory, web applications, data services, Docker containers, Microsoft Dynamics solutions. Let's consider them in order.
Virtual Machines
Section “ Virtual Machines”Aggregates all the solutions built on the basis of virtual machines Linux and Windows, both by the community of developers of open source software, and by third-party developers of commercial software and Microsoft. In mid-July 2015, the store presented more than 650 various solutions, including: Windows Server 2012 R2, Cloudera Enterprise, Jelastic, DataStax, Veeam Cloud Connect, SAP HANA Developer Edition, NGINX, CoreOS, Kaspersky Labs, IBM DB2 and many others others.
Developers and IT professionals can in a few clicks purchase and deploy any of the solutions in their environment Azure infrastructure in the form of one or a whole set of virtual machines. The store greatly simplifies the process of deploying solutions, offering everything you need for quick manual or, most importantly, automatic deployment of solutions, both on the basis of a single machine and the most complex configurations of entire clusters of machines integrated into virtual networks and configured for high availability.
Services for developers The
section of services for developers offers new and previously available in the Azure Store ready-made PaaS services offering a variety of features for developers of IaaS or PaaS solutions based on the Azure cloud.
In mid-July 2015, the service catalog presented more than 50 services from independent developers and Microsoft, including: ABBYY OCR SDK, Auth0, Bing Maps API, ClearDB MySQL, Face APIs, IronMQ, Memcached Cloud, New Relic, MongoLab, Nodejitsu Redis, SendGrid, RavenDB and others.
API Apps
API Apps are ready-made API applications created by Microsoft for developers to use when developing Azure Logic App based on workflows (more about Logic Apps).
Among the presented API Apps are Oracle DB Connector, Twitter Connector, Slack Connector, Office 365 and OneDrive Connector and others.
Connectors for Azure Active Directory
Azure Active Directory allows you to combine cloud-based applications and applications located in the enterprise network under a single authentication, authorization and security system.
A distinctive feature of Azure AD is the integration function with external SaaS services and applications, such as Google Apps, Dropbox, Saleforce, Office365 and others. With hundreds of ready-made connectors available through the Azure Marketplace, Azure AD users can easily access third-party services using a single account.
Web applications
Azure Marketplace offers dozens of ready-made templates for popular CMS and web applications such as Drupal, Wordpress, Django, CakePHP, Flask, Joomla, Express, ASP.NET projects and many others.
A distinctive feature of web application templates is that they are designed to be deployed in the Azure Web App environment — in the form of services rather than virtual machines, which simplifies and accelerates their deployment, maintenance, and lower cost.
Data Services
Thanks to the integration of Azure Marketplace with a large number of data services and data sources, developers can easily access public data on demographics, maps, search queries, recommendations, geography, translation and others.
Data from the Azure Marketplace can be easily retrieved and integrated into proprietary solutions.
Docker Containers
One of the most recent additions to the Azure Marketplace is the containerized apps section, ready to be deployed in the Azure cloud.
Among them, currently represented: Redis, Nginx, MySQL, Jenkins, Memcached, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ and other popular tools. All containers in this section are created using Docker technology and can be quickly deployed to Azure.
Microsoft Dynamics Solutions
Another section of the Azure Marketplace is the Microsoft Dynamics solutions section, which is a set of ready-made pre-configured configurations of Dynamics family of products based on virtual machines for quick deployment on the Microsoft Azure platform.
In order to quickly deploy a complex solution on the Azure platform, you can take advantage of the Azure Marketplace. To do this, select a solution in the Azure store (consider the example of an Apache Cassandra cluster based on DataStax ).
Clicking on the “Create a virtual machine” link will take you to the Azure portal to the wizard for creating a cluster based on a solution from DataStax.
After filling in the necessary parameters, you will be able to set the cluster size with the number of nodes:
By specifying a few more parameters you will get a cluster deployed in Azure combining many nodes:
Thus, the Azure Marketplace allowed you to deploy a complex infrastructure solution consisting of dozens of elements in a few clicks and in a few minutes.
We saw the Azure Marketplace as a powerful tool that makes it easier for developers and IT professionals to deploy solutions and organize environments based on different solutions in the Azure cloud.
On the other hand, the Azure Marketplace is a powerful sales channel for independent software developers. Today, dozens of new solutions from companies from many countries are added to the store every month. These solutions receive diverse marketing support from Microsoft and additional promotion to the target audience. An example of such a promotion is the Microsoft Partner Apps channel .
The Azure Markertplace channel, with presence in more than hundreds of markets around the world, is a great way for any software developer to enter the global stage and start selling themselves anywhere in the world without the hassle of legal and tax issues.
Azure Marketplace in Russia
Today, developers from two dozen countries can publish solutions in Azure Marketplce. So far, Russia is not included in the list of such countries and publication for Russian developers is limited. However, several Russian companies with a global presence have already successfully published their solutions in the Azure Marketplace. Among them: Kaspersky Labs , Veeam , Jelastic and NGINX .
The possibility of publishing decisions from Russia will be added in the near future. In the meantime, Russian developers and IT professionals can freely use the Azure Marketplace and third-party solutions to create interesting new projects based on the Azure cloud.
We examined from all sides the capabilities and advantages of the Azure Marketplace for developers and IT professionals who are interested in new features, as well as for independent software vendors who want to get a new sales channel for their solution, enter new markets, get support and additional promotion.
Azure Marketplace - a new tool, platform, channel from Microsoft, its functionality will constantly increase, and its geographical presence will expand. Already today, the store features over 3,300 products for various purposes from hundreds of independent developers and open source communities.
In the following articles, we will continue to share the details and news of the Azure Marketplace and the stories of our partners who have already begun to use the store for their purposes.
The latest Microsoft WPC Partner Conference announced new features in the Azure Marketplace, including support for Multi-VM configurations and software-based deployment management through Azure Resource Manager templates. Details in this publication .
Get acquainted with the description of the blog Azure solutions DataStax, allowing to quickly deploy a large cluster of machines for Apache Cassandra storage.
You can find the latest news on the Azure platform, including the Azure Marketplace, on the official blog http://azure.microsoft.com/blog .
Follow us on Microsoft Partner Apps on Twitter to learn more about new solutions and technological innovations by independent software developers.
You can find more than 3,300 diverse solutions on the Azure Marketplace page .
Deploy your own PaaS platform from Jelastic in Azure, integrate it with your own local environment.
Vladimir Yunev
Strategic Technology Expert, Microsoft, Russia
Vladimir Yunev is a certified application developer with over 12 years of experience. He works at Microsoft Russia’s Strategic Technology Department, and is responsible for using Microsoft's cloud and web technologies in web applications, services and mobile clients. A regular participant and organizer of many Russian IT conferences, the author of a book on the development of web applications on the ASP.NET MVC platform. In the developer community, he is known as XaocCPS.
I will be glad to chat with you: Twitter - https://twitter.com/XaocCPS and Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/yunev .
The first article will tell you about the Azure Marketplace , which, with the help of Microsoft, provides developers and IT professionals with a convenient way to deploy certified certified solutions and access to third-party cloud services that expand the capabilities of the cloud platform. In addition, the store offers developers from a number of countries (the list will expand) a new sales channel for its solutions in 100+ countries of the world.
Azure marketplace
Azure Marketplace is a catalog of solutions, services, environment images of various complexity, ready for quick automatic deployment on the Azure platform.
The main idea of the Azure Marketplace is to give an independent developer a sales channel for their solutions around the world, and Azure customers are an easy way to deploy functional solutions in their own infrastructure.
Marketplace as a functional extension of Azure
Today, in the Azure Marketplace, you can find dozens of services offered by independent developers that extend the functionality of the Azure cloud. The solutions available in the store are divided into categories: virtual machines, developer services, API Apps, connectors for Azure Active Directory, web applications, data services, Docker containers, Microsoft Dynamics solutions. Let's consider them in order.
Virtual Machines
Section “ Virtual Machines”Aggregates all the solutions built on the basis of virtual machines Linux and Windows, both by the community of developers of open source software, and by third-party developers of commercial software and Microsoft. In mid-July 2015, the store presented more than 650 various solutions, including: Windows Server 2012 R2, Cloudera Enterprise, Jelastic, DataStax, Veeam Cloud Connect, SAP HANA Developer Edition, NGINX, CoreOS, Kaspersky Labs, IBM DB2 and many others others.
Developers and IT professionals can in a few clicks purchase and deploy any of the solutions in their environment Azure infrastructure in the form of one or a whole set of virtual machines. The store greatly simplifies the process of deploying solutions, offering everything you need for quick manual or, most importantly, automatic deployment of solutions, both on the basis of a single machine and the most complex configurations of entire clusters of machines integrated into virtual networks and configured for high availability.
Services for developers The
section of services for developers offers new and previously available in the Azure Store ready-made PaaS services offering a variety of features for developers of IaaS or PaaS solutions based on the Azure cloud.
In mid-July 2015, the service catalog presented more than 50 services from independent developers and Microsoft, including: ABBYY OCR SDK, Auth0, Bing Maps API, ClearDB MySQL, Face APIs, IronMQ, Memcached Cloud, New Relic, MongoLab, Nodejitsu Redis, SendGrid, RavenDB and others.
API Apps
API Apps are ready-made API applications created by Microsoft for developers to use when developing Azure Logic App based on workflows (more about Logic Apps).
Among the presented API Apps are Oracle DB Connector, Twitter Connector, Slack Connector, Office 365 and OneDrive Connector and others.
Connectors for Azure Active Directory
Azure Active Directory allows you to combine cloud-based applications and applications located in the enterprise network under a single authentication, authorization and security system.
A distinctive feature of Azure AD is the integration function with external SaaS services and applications, such as Google Apps, Dropbox, Saleforce, Office365 and others. With hundreds of ready-made connectors available through the Azure Marketplace, Azure AD users can easily access third-party services using a single account.
Web applications
Azure Marketplace offers dozens of ready-made templates for popular CMS and web applications such as Drupal, Wordpress, Django, CakePHP, Flask, Joomla, Express, ASP.NET projects and many others.
A distinctive feature of web application templates is that they are designed to be deployed in the Azure Web App environment — in the form of services rather than virtual machines, which simplifies and accelerates their deployment, maintenance, and lower cost.
Data Services
Thanks to the integration of Azure Marketplace with a large number of data services and data sources, developers can easily access public data on demographics, maps, search queries, recommendations, geography, translation and others.
Data from the Azure Marketplace can be easily retrieved and integrated into proprietary solutions.
Docker Containers
One of the most recent additions to the Azure Marketplace is the containerized apps section, ready to be deployed in the Azure cloud.
Among them, currently represented: Redis, Nginx, MySQL, Jenkins, Memcached, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ and other popular tools. All containers in this section are created using Docker technology and can be quickly deployed to Azure.
Microsoft Dynamics Solutions
Another section of the Azure Marketplace is the Microsoft Dynamics solutions section, which is a set of ready-made pre-configured configurations of Dynamics family of products based on virtual machines for quick deployment on the Microsoft Azure platform.
Quick Start with Azure Marketplace
In order to quickly deploy a complex solution on the Azure platform, you can take advantage of the Azure Marketplace. To do this, select a solution in the Azure store (consider the example of an Apache Cassandra cluster based on DataStax ).
Clicking on the “Create a virtual machine” link will take you to the Azure portal to the wizard for creating a cluster based on a solution from DataStax.
After filling in the necessary parameters, you will be able to set the cluster size with the number of nodes:
By specifying a few more parameters you will get a cluster deployed in Azure combining many nodes:
Thus, the Azure Marketplace allowed you to deploy a complex infrastructure solution consisting of dozens of elements in a few clicks and in a few minutes.
Azure Marketplace as a sales channel
We saw the Azure Marketplace as a powerful tool that makes it easier for developers and IT professionals to deploy solutions and organize environments based on different solutions in the Azure cloud.
On the other hand, the Azure Marketplace is a powerful sales channel for independent software developers. Today, dozens of new solutions from companies from many countries are added to the store every month. These solutions receive diverse marketing support from Microsoft and additional promotion to the target audience. An example of such a promotion is the Microsoft Partner Apps channel .
The Azure Markertplace channel, with presence in more than hundreds of markets around the world, is a great way for any software developer to enter the global stage and start selling themselves anywhere in the world without the hassle of legal and tax issues.
Azure Marketplace in Russia
Today, developers from two dozen countries can publish solutions in Azure Marketplce. So far, Russia is not included in the list of such countries and publication for Russian developers is limited. However, several Russian companies with a global presence have already successfully published their solutions in the Azure Marketplace. Among them: Kaspersky Labs , Veeam , Jelastic and NGINX .
The possibility of publishing decisions from Russia will be added in the near future. In the meantime, Russian developers and IT professionals can freely use the Azure Marketplace and third-party solutions to create interesting new projects based on the Azure cloud.
Conclusion
We examined from all sides the capabilities and advantages of the Azure Marketplace for developers and IT professionals who are interested in new features, as well as for independent software vendors who want to get a new sales channel for their solution, enter new markets, get support and additional promotion.
Azure Marketplace - a new tool, platform, channel from Microsoft, its functionality will constantly increase, and its geographical presence will expand. Already today, the store features over 3,300 products for various purposes from hundreds of independent developers and open source communities.
In the following articles, we will continue to share the details and news of the Azure Marketplace and the stories of our partners who have already begun to use the store for their purposes.
news
The latest Microsoft WPC Partner Conference announced new features in the Azure Marketplace, including support for Multi-VM configurations and software-based deployment management through Azure Resource Manager templates. Details in this publication .
Get acquainted with the description of the blog Azure solutions DataStax, allowing to quickly deploy a large cluster of machines for Apache Cassandra storage.
useful links
You can find the latest news on the Azure platform, including the Azure Marketplace, on the official blog http://azure.microsoft.com/blog .
Follow us on Microsoft Partner Apps on Twitter to learn more about new solutions and technological innovations by independent software developers.
You can find more than 3,300 diverse solutions on the Azure Marketplace page .
Decision of the day
Deploy your own PaaS platform from Jelastic in Azure, integrate it with your own local environment.
about the author
Vladimir Yunev
Strategic Technology Expert, Microsoft, Russia
Vladimir Yunev is a certified application developer with over 12 years of experience. He works at Microsoft Russia’s Strategic Technology Department, and is responsible for using Microsoft's cloud and web technologies in web applications, services and mobile clients. A regular participant and organizer of many Russian IT conferences, the author of a book on the development of web applications on the ASP.NET MVC platform. In the developer community, he is known as XaocCPS.
I will be glad to chat with you: Twitter - https://twitter.com/XaocCPS and Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/yunev .
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