Understanding Microsoft Azure Marketplace
“If you want to complete a task in the least amount of time possible… get an IT Administrator to do it!
IT professionals are always stretched for time. That being said, IT administrators have always been great at finding quick, sound solutions to address or automate complex and lengthy tasks. One said task is the enablement of services required by the organization or by the IT department themselves. Previously IT administrators would have to setup infrastructure or spin up VMs in cloud to enable said services on behalf of the organization they support.
Enter Azure Marketplace, a non-stop shop with well over 3000 services available to IT administrators. The marketplace’s product categories include application services, virtual machines, Azure Active Directory applications, API apps, data service and Web applications. Service provided are both Microsoft created and third party offerings and does much more than offering single deployable OS images. Azure Marketplace offers solutions spanning multiple virtual machines and event Azure services like Web Apps which can be grouped together into logical resource groups.
Suppose your organization has taken an interest in enabling the DevOps methodology to better serve IT staff and developers alike in the pursuit of quicker application creation and deployment. Tools such as Chef, an VM automation & reporting tool, could aid in this endeavour and can be quickly setup in Azure Marketplace by following these simple steps:
- Visit Azure Marketplace
- Enter Chef in the search bar
- Select Chef Server 12
- Scroll to view General Computing tiers and record what offering best serves your needs
- Scroll back to the top of the page and select the license required via the drop down list
- Click Create Virtual Machine
Follow the remaining steps on enabling the specific computing tier required for said Chef deployment.
Further specific details surrounding Chef utilization on Azure will be penned in an upcoming post.