Announcing Jumpstart Agora

In the past four years, Azure Arc Jumpstart has grown tremendously to become the de facto standard Azure Arc skilling and enablement resource for customers, partners, and Microsoft's field sellers. Today, we are excited to announce Jumpstart Agora!

 

 

 

 

 

Jumpstart Agora is a marketplace of various “cloud to edge” industry scenarios, designed to provide an end-to-end user experience. The word "Agora" comes from the ancient Greek term for a public gathering place or assembly, and it has come to be used more broadly to refer to any place or forum where people come together for discussion or exchange.

 

 

Jumpstart Agora is a marketplace of various “cloud to edge” industry scenarios, designed to provide an end-to-end user experience. The word "Agora" comes from the ancient Greek term for a public gathering place or assembly, and it has come to be used more broadly to refer to any place or forum where people come together for discussion or exchange.

 

Agora scenarios

 

Our mission is to create a rich marketplace of applications that can leverage Hybrid Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and make those accessible for enablement and educational purposes via the Jumpstart automation mechanisms.

 

As we are embarking on the Agora journey, there are many scenarios we would like to include. Based on customers and community feedback, our first scenario will cover the story of “Contoso Supermarket”, where we will show you how Contoso, a leading global retailer, is going through it's digital revolution.

 

Who is it for?

 

One of the major investments we made is to ensure the Agora scenarios cover as many personas in the organization as possible. Sure, there is always room for more, but we believe with this initial release there is something for everyone - IT, platform engineers, developers, and data architects. Just by looking at the first set of Contoso Supermarket scenarios, you can see right away the breadth of it.

 

• Data pipeline and reporting across cloud and edge for store orders
• Data pipeline and reporting across cloud and edge for sensor telemetry
• Enabling AI at the Edge & Software configurations rollout with basic GitOps flow
• Streamlining the Software Delivery Process using CI/CD
• Infrastructure observability for Kubernetes and Arc-enabled Kubernetes
• Infrastructure observability for Azure Arc-enabled servers using Azure Monitor
• Infrastructure security with Microsoft Defender for Servers

It is also important to mention that our approach hasn't changed, and we continue to leverage open-source technologies wherever possible. We are always striving to find the right balance between industry standards and wildly adopted OSS solutions but also amplify Azure services and show the art of the possible by using it. 

 

Technology, so much technology!

 

As you can expect from a Jumpstart experience, we included a set of detail-oriented docs and complementary automation so you can start deploying right away! There is a lot of ground to cover and various architectural elements, a rich technology stack, and implementations to explore.

 

 

The amount of tech included in Agora and this first Contoso scenario is impressive! You will get a chance to have hands-on experience with Azure Arc, industrial IoT, data solutions, messaging brokers, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability dashboards, and so much more.

 

 

 

 

Deployment options

 

With this release of Jumpstart Agora, we provide two deployment mechanisms for you to choose from, the standard Azure bicep template and for the first time in Jumpstart, you are now able to deploy using the Azure Developer CLI (azd).

 

 

We are excited about the partnership with the azd team. Deploying the Agora scenarios using azd is such a seamless, frictionless, and easy experience! Just a few parameters and you are on your way 

 

 

Why now?

 

Until today, the Jumpstart team's main focus was to create reference automation and bundled solutions with “a technology mindset", meaning, developing assets and collateral for solving the challenges of adopting Azure Arc and educating the community on how to onboard and use Azure Arc services and its potential integrations with the Azure ecosystem.

 

With thousands of users enjoying our compressive scenarios for ArcBox and HCIBox, it was a no-brainer for us to think about our next big thing and how to align ourselves with the rapidly changing industries and technologies around us. We wanted to make sure we are aligning with Microsoft's future investments and market trends as well as developing artifacts that will allow us to engage with more tech communities out there so we can all grow together.

 

Getting started

 

We are thrilled to have you trying things out! To get started, hop over to our new Jumpstart Agora page. As always, feedback is welcomed and everything is backed up by our GitHub repository, so if you have any questions, you can use the Jumpstart GitHub Discussions or simply open an issue.