10 things you need to know about Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. ⁽¹⁾

Here are 10 interesting facts about Microsoft’s Azure platform Marketplace:

1. Azure was announced in October 2008 and released on 1 February 2010 as Windows Azure, before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on 25 March 2014. ⁽²⁾
2. Azure is generally available in 32 regions around the world, and has announced plans for 6 additional regions ⁽³⁾
3. Microsoft says that they are growing at a rate of 120.000 new customers per month ⁽⁴⁾
4. There are 1.4 million SQL databases deployed in Azure ⁽⁴⁾
5. Every week, 2 trillion messages are processed by Azure IoT ⁽⁴⁾
6. 5 million organizations are using Azure Active Directory ⁽⁴⁾
7. 4 million developers are registered with Visual Studio Team services ⁽⁴⁾
8. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform was the largest growth driver for their ‘Intelligent Cloud Unit’, growing 93% year-to-year as the company said its commercial cloud annualized run rate passed $14 billion. ⁽⁵⁾
9. 40 percent of Azure revenue comes from start-ups and ISVs. ⁽⁴⁾
10. 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies are currently using Azure to some capacity. ⁽⁴⁾

Microsoft Azure offers two deployment models for cloud resources: the “classic” deployment model and the Azure Resource Manager. In the classic model, each Azure resource (virtual machine, SQL database, etc.) was managed individually. The Azure Resource Manager (also ‘ARM’ in short), introduced in 2014, enables users to create groups of related services so that closely coupled resources can be deployed, managed, and monitored together. ⁽⁶⁾

AWINGU ON AZURE MARKETPLACE

Since the summer of 2014, Awingu has been available on the Azure Marketplace. As of 2016, Awingu introduced the second app in the Azure Marketplace with “Awingu All-in-One”. This last one leverages the ‘new’ Azure Resource Manager.

In short, Awingu All-in-One offers a very easy way to deploy an online workspace in Azure. It will take no longer than 5 minutes to setup via a simple install wizard, and Azure will start the deployment of a full back-end environment with the Awingu virtual appliance, Active Directory, Application Servers etc. Administrators will just need to upload and install the desired applications and create users and permissions in Active Directory. Easy and fast.

Read here how simple it is to deploy Awingu, or have a look at this short video (as of 4.40 minute)

OTHER SERVICES AVAILABLE ON AZURE

The products and services sold through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace come from either Microsoft directly or its technology partners. Before they become available for purchase on the Marketplace, all services and products are certified through the Microsoft Azure Certified program to ensure compatibility with the Azure public cloud.

As of June 2016, the Microsoft Azure Marketplace offers over 3,800 products organized into seven categories:

• Virtual machines (VM): Software images designed for Linux and Windows Server virtual machines. These are provided by Microsoft and other software vendors.
• Developer services: Add-on services for application development and management.
• API apps: Tools to help developers connect applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings and application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Azure Active Directory applications: Applications that can be configured on Azure Active Directory to support user account management and single-sign on.
• Web applications: Azure web apps and templates, including open source options.
• Data services: Services that provide data on demographics, financials, retail, sports and a range of other categories. Organizations can use this data for custom applications and business intelligence tools.
• Microsoft Dynamics solutions: Products that can be used alongside Microsoft Dynamics, a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications from Microsoft.

The Microsoft Azure Marketplace has various pricing and subscription options, based on product type. Some products are free, while others involve a monthly charge or follow a pay-as-you-go model. Users are charged separately for the Marketplace products they purchase and their Azure infrastructure costs. ⁽⁷⁾

Sources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure
2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/upcoming-name-change-for-windows-azure/
3. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/
4. https://www.petri.com/microsoft-azure-numbers
5. http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/01/26/microsoft-posts-strong-fiscal-q2-earnings-beating-consensus-on-cloud-growth/#486f6a974989
6. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-manager-deployment-model
7. http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/Microsoft-Azure-Marketplace