Background
Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE (SmsE) — StratusOn's flagship product featuring easy-to-use visual, drag-and-drop UI and ARM Template builders — was created specifically for developers working to tackle the daunting process of publishing software offers to the Azure Marketplace. While our Engineering Team remains hard at work making improvements to ENSEMBLE, we thought it would be helpful to highlight our Maestro Studio SOLO (SmsS) offering a bit.
So, why Maestro Studio SOLO and just how is it different?
Maestro Studio SOLO's Niche
Simply put, Maestro Studio SOLO is ENSEMBLE's visual ARM Template Builder packaged as a standalone tool and is ideal for the busy Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) or DevOps Engineer responsible for creating and maintaining ARM Templates.
SOLO's elegant, visual drag-and-drop UI makes ARM Template management efficient and error-free — complete in minutes what normally takes hours or days. A special CUID sandbox is embedded along with an auto-preview feature to allow viewing the results of any changes made on-the-fly, in real-time. The preview shows exactly how your ARM Template will look in the Azure Marketplace.
Maestro Studio SOLO offers ENSEMBLE's visual ARM Template Designer as a standalone tool, ideal for busy Cloud Solution Architects (CSA) and DevOps Engineers.
SOLO retains the powerful core functionality and utilities integral to ENSEMBLE. Functionality: real-time error checking and validation, live Azure Marketplace previewing, and immediate publishing. Utilities: JSON Editor, API Studio suite, and Visual ARM Expressions Designer.
You no longer need to spend hours/days manually composing JSON scripts to build your ARM Templates because SOLO does it for you automatically (you can still edit your JSON in SOLO, if desired). SOLO's real-time validation simplifies testing and troubleshooting by pinpointing the exact location and context of any errors you encounter, iteratively and instantly.
Existing ARM Templates can be imported, modified, and published immediately. There are no restrictions or limits on how many ARM Templates you can create. Build as many as you want or need.
ARM Templates Built-In
SOLO provides Quickstart templates for the rapid design and deployment of ARM Templates. ARM Templates created and maintained with SOLO can be provided to developers to assist with their publishing projects (built in ENSEMBLE!) and shared with other infrastructure teams with parallel responsibilities. The Preview pane shows you exactly how your offer will look when published.
Figure 1. Windows VM ARM Template in SOLO (w/Preview Pane)
Integrated JSON Editor
Still prefer to code in JSON? No problem, use SOLO's built-in editor. Note that the Windows VM template (shown in Figures 1, 2) contains 1,800+ lines of code. Have at it!
Figure 2. JSON Editor in SOLO
More Utilities Still
Keep an eye out for upcoming posts with more detailed information regarding our API Studio with functionality that rivals/beats Postman (Figure 3) and our visual ARM Expression Builder utilities.
Figure 3. API Studio in SOLO
API Studio is a powerful tool for composing ARM and MS Graph APIs. It comes with many built-in API templates and allows dragging and dropping API definitions as ARM API Controls. Our visual ARM Expressions Builder allows creating UI expressions easily without having to remember the syntax or do trial-and-error.
SOLO ARM Template Builder Benefits
- Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates
- Visual ARM Templates designer
- Visual ARM Expressions designer
- End-to-end, real-time testing and validation
- Several Quickstart templates available
- Access to published Azure Marketplace templates
Experience Maestro Studio SOLO Today
- Maestro Studio SOLO is currently in beta and is, at this time, only available as a FREE TRIAL from the Azure Marketplace.
- To install Maestro Studio SOLO on a desktop machine or on your own VM, or for a full demo, contact us.
- To learn more about Maestro Studio SOLO’s amazing benefits and functionality, visit the SOLO product page.
Please visit us at the StratusOn home page.