[FEATURE] Deploy MONA from Azure Marketplace

[tfsjohan]

What if we use Azure Marketplace and a Solution Template offer to deploy MONA in the clients subscription?

I do not have a complete plan on how to do this, this this post is a mix of ideas and questions.

Collect information from the user

A createUiDefinition.json file can be used to collect more information from the user, such as options we have both as required and optional in the basic-deploy.sh script.

Deploy ARM template

How much of the CLI commands in basic-deploy.sh can be created with ARM templates and the variables from createUiDefinition?
Is it possible to run a script during deployment of a Marketplace solution, and if so, could we use basic-deploy.sh in a headless mode with arguments collection from createUiDefinition?

Why would it be worth the time?

When I speak to customers, partners and actually even Microsoft employees, they don't see a clear and easy path to get their solutions to Azure Marketplace. If we could make it as simple as a couple of clicks in the Marketplace I believe we can improve the number of solutions in the marketplace, and also show that we eat our own dog food.

– How do you get started with Azure Marketplace?
– Just install it from Azure Marketplace. :)

Let's discuss if this is a good idea and possible for us to achieve.

[caseywatson]

I. Love. This. Idea. Unfortunately, we're limited in what we can add to the Azure Marketplace. What if instead, we could simplify the deployment by having the user just click a Deploy to Azure button? Would that be a step in the right direction?

[tfsjohan]

Yes. I think it would be.

Is it still possible to have some sort of UI to ask the user questions that is used as variables in deployment templates? Basically the same thing as we do with options to the cli script today. Resource group, name, etc.

I guess a server endpoint could take a querystring with parameters and generate the arm templates server side if there's no build in way to pass arguments/variables to the "Deploy to Azure" link.

[Josverl]

Assuming the ARM template uses parameters and has defaults , then these should be asked for in teh azure UX ,

The portal displays a pane that allows you to easily provide parameter values.
The parameters are pre-filled with the default values from the template. The camel-cased parameter name, storageAccountType, defined in the template is turned into a space-separated string when displayed on the portal.

[caseywatson]

I thought about this a lot over the holidays. To achieve this in a clean way, I think we'd need to move Mona to containers which I'm definitely open to. We could handle the remaining configuration -- AAD, etc. -- using a deploymentScript action in the bicep template. Let's discuss this further soon. Seems like we might be trending toward containers some anyway per #88.