Microsoft recently introduced Jumpstart Agora, a new initiative to provide end-to-end industry scenarios for cloud-to-edge solutions. The first project that has been released is Contoso Supermarket, a sample point-of-sale application.
Jumpstart Agora is designed as a marketplace to showcase various industry applications and increase developer velocity using Azure Arc Jumpstart. Lior Kamrat, principal product manager at Microsoft, explains:
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.
The Azure Arc Jumpstart includes step-by-step scenarios with the Azure Arc platform, which allows developers to go through scenarios that incorporate as much automation as possible, detailed screenshots, and code samples. Agora provides sandbox environments, training tools for various Microsoft Azure services, demo environments for customer presentations or events, and an integration testing platform.
According to the cloud provider, Agora scenarios try to leverage open-source technologies and cover as many personas in the organization as possible. Kamrat adds:
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 its digital revolution.
Based on a fictional company, the sample point-of-sale application Contoso Supermarket is designed to provide hands-on experience with Azure Arc, industrial IoT, data solutions, messaging brokers, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and observability dashboards.
Source: Azure blog
The project provides examples of data pipeline and reporting across cloud and edge for store orders and sensor telemetry, infrastructure observability for Azure Arc-enabled servers using Azure Monitor, and security with Microsoft Defender. Chris Black, senior principal systems development engineer at Dell Technologies, comments:
What a phenomenal idea! The whole concept of it is really exciting and feels like a natural evolution of the Jumpstart itself.
Azure provides two deployment options for Jumpstart Agora projects: the Azure Bicep template and the Azure Developer CLI (azd). To run the automation scripts that deploy and configure Agora features, the deployment requires an Azure service principal with Contributor or Owner role-based access control (RBAC) on an Azure subscription and resource group.
The projects can be deployed to a subset of Azure regions in the US and Europe and incur standard charges for the resources provisioned such as virtual machines and storage. A cost estimate for the Contoso Supermarket scenario is provided.