Overview Of Azure MarketPlace

Introduction

In this article we are going to learn the Azure Market Place and what exactly you can achieve with it.

What is Azure MarketPlace?

What exactly is the Azure MarketPlace? In this article we are going to learn the Azure Market Place and what exactly you can achieve with it. In short the Azure marketplace is a store of nearly one thousand virtual machine images, developer services and more. Some are from Microsoft but most come from partners and communities.

How does it work?

So how does it all work? Internally on Azure, we use the Azure resource manager platform to manage to deploy infrastructure in the cloud. This is done using json based templates called Azure Resource Manager Templates or ARM templates for short. They describethe what andthe how of the deployment. Deploying for the azure market place is as easy as searching for a particular VM, service or solution and clicking deploy from the gallery. You can read more about ARM Templates here.

However you can simply perform the same search and deployment right from within the azure portal.

portal

How the Pricing works?

So you might be wondering how the pricing work does. It’s pretty straight forward. In a case of virtual machine which is the most commonly deployed resource from the marketplace, first you pay the actual computing time, in other words you pay for the virtual machine that is hosting the solution you want to deploy. Then if the publisher has chosen to charge the fee for their solution you will pay for that.

Payment Options for Azure MarketPlace:

So what options doesthe publishers have and what are the ways you may or may not pay for solution from the marketplace? Currently it supports five options.

The 1st is free, you pay nothing about the compute cast of your virtual machine.
2nd you have Free Trial. You get a trial of software for a period of time then if you still running it you’ll be migrated to the paid subscription.
3rd BYOL or Bring Your Own License. This just means you already own a license or you have purchased one directly form the publisher and you’ll use it for this deployment.
The 4th option is Usage Based Billing where buyer will pay hourly fee much like you do for compute to use the software. This fee is added on the top of compute fee for your VM.
The 5th option is Monthly Fee. With monthly fee you pay a flat fee per month for the software.

What is in the Azure MarketPlace?

So what exactly is in the Azure MarketPlace? And how does it help you get things done? Let’s go over few example scenarios, starting with security. If you need antispam technology or firewall that can detect or block SQL Injections, cross side scripting, malware uploads and more. Check out Barracuda, you may read more about Barracuda here. If you need antivirus for malware protection, log inspection and intrusion detection, file integrity and more check out the solution from Trend Micro. You can read more about TrendMicro here what is it actually.

There are numerous DevOps solutions in the azure MarketPlace to make is easier to build, deploy, monitor and scale your solutions. There are many solutions for continuous integration and continuous delivery. XebiaLabs, Stack Storm, Jenkins from CloudBees and Solano Labs have you covered and it all available in the Azure MarketPlace.

If infrastructure in application orchestration is on your demand, check out Puppet and Chef. Both can be installed from the market place in minutes and have you well on your way. You can read more about Puppet here. What about source control, code reviews, documentations and issue tracking, check out GitLab from Bitnami, which gives you unlimited free private repositories and it is free.

Data Solutions:

Azure already includes many data solutions such as Azure SQLs, Azure radios and document db. However it’s not always of one size fits all and many of Microsoft partners have made their solutions available in the market place. This includes oracle, MySQL, cloudera, Hortonworks, Couchbase, mongoDB and others.

What if you need more than a bare bones operating system but don’t need a full blown solution in box? There are hundreds of various software stacks ready to deploy from the marketplace. Bitnami has over 80 virtual machine images to get you going including wordpress, Ruby, Node.js, Jango and more. Many readers might be novices to the industry, well you guys can take a look here about Bitnami.

In Windows or Linux chances are you'll find a VM image to get you started. Why not try out the Azure MarketPlace today? Check out the try Azure MarketPlace to get started now.