Azure Managed Applications are now available in public preview in the Azure portal, Microsoft announced.
This provides an ecosystem to allow managed service providers (MSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), and corporate central IT teams to provide turnkey solutions through either the Azure Marketplace or Service Catalog. With this solution, vendors can manage and support their applications so that the customers who deploy managed applications don’t have to maintain, update, or service them.
There are two different options for offering Azure Managed Applications — Service Catalog Managed Applications and Marketplace Managed Applications. Here’s more information about each option.
Service Catalog Managed Applications
With Service Catalog, organizations can create a catalog of approved solutions for Aure. By maintaining such a catalog, you can easily ensure compliance with certain organizational standards while still providing great solutions for the organization. This makes it a solution that should be especially appealing to central IT teams for enterprise organizations.
You can create Service Catalog Managed Applications using Azure CLI. Once you’ve created your Managed Applications, only you and the people you share them with can see them.
Marketplace Managed Applications
On the other hand, you can also create Managed Applications and make them available in the marketplace on the Azure portal. As a vendor, you simply publish your application to the marketplace and it becomes available for anyone inside or outside your organization to consume. So if you’re trying to offer a solution to a wide range of users, this is likely the option that’s right for you.
To publish Managed Applications to the Azure Marketplace, you can use Azure’s Cloud Partner Portal. Then you add your files in the publishing portal like you would with other Solution templates. But in the SKU setting, you can specify that you’re creating a Managed Application instead of another type of file. Then your offer goes through some prerequisite checks, validations, and other reviews before being made available in the marketplace.
Photo credit: Freerange Stock
