The best way to learn how to build an Azure Managed Application (AMA) is to start with a real, working example, NOT a simple, hello world sample!
This is exatly what Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE's most popular feature/tool, called Azure Application Explorer, allows anyone to do.
The best way to learn how to build an Azure Managed Application (AMA) is to start with a real, working example, NOT a simple, hello world sample!
Get started in 3 steps
The process consists of the following 3 simple steps:
1. Click on the Azure Application Explorer card in the Lobby view of Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE.
2. Browse the list of 1,500+ Azure Application plans (both Solution Templates and Azure Managed Apps) available in the Azure Marketplace using Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE's special picker. You can group by publisher, filter by a keyword in the publisher's name, offer name or plan name, and sort by the most recently published or updated plans. Select an Azure Application plan to load it into the design canvas.
3. Click on the Preview button on the design canvas toolbar to preview the Azure Application in the Azure Portal.
Congratulations! Within a few seconds you were able to locate and load the Azure artifacts of an Azure Application, inspect the createUiDefinition and ARM template JSON, and see what it looks like live in the Azure Portal.
Next Steps
Now that you know how to load any existing, published Azure Application, you can use the visual IDE, with its drag-and-drop capabilities and built-in validation, to make incremental changes to the UI or ARM template and preview your changes live in the Azure Portal. Once happy with what you have, you can save your work and work on building in your own product and solution's features.
You can also use the embedded AI assistant, Moka, for creating or updating your work. It is accessible from the toolbar in the design canvas (see screenshot above).
Once you're ready to go live, use the Partner Center tab (shown in the screenshot above) in Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE to connect your work with Partner Center so you can export your work into the zip package that Partner Center expects for Azure Applications. You can also use drag-and-drop to move the zip into Partner Center without leaving Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE.
You will notice that the staged offer looks exactly the same as the preview you saw in Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE. ENSEMBLE allows you to iterate more quickly, within its IDE, so that you only publish to the Azure Marketplace's staging, and later to production, when you're ready. This way you don't waste precious time waiting for the certification team or the validation pipeline to finish, which can take from 15 minutes to hours when publishing to staging, and sometimes days when publishing live to production.
After you publish to production and your offer becomes live and visible to the public, if you need to make changes or correct something, all you need to do is go back Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE, load your saved work, make the changes and preview, and repeat the process to push to Partner Center.
Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE provides a powerful design-time experience inside a visual IDE, augmented with an AI assistant to provide the best, most productive experience and enable faster, error-free publishing to the Azure Marketplace.
Conclusion
The feature mentioned in this article is available in the Free Trial of Maestro Studio ENSEMBLE, which allows you to kick the tires, so to speak, and get a first-hand experience of the product and the value it can bring and benefits it can add to your publishing process so you don't have to deal with the mundane details and focus on your own product.
We hope you find this feature useful. Please provide us with feedback using our Contact form. You can also send us feedback from within the product using our Megaphone feature.
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