Azure Managed Applications: Empowering Service Providers
Section
- Accelerate Service Delivery: Deploy applications and updates faster and more reliably across customer subscriptions with standardized, automated provisioning.
- Strengthen Governance and Compliance: Enforce Azure policies and role-based access controls by design, reducing risks and ensuring every deployment meets regulatory standards.
- Monetize Your Expertise: Package your intellectual property as transactable Azure Marketplace offerings to open new revenue streams and reach more customers globally.
- Centralize Operations at Scale: Manage multiple customer environments from a single control plane with Azure Lighthouse cross-tenant capabilities.
- Reduce Operational Overhead: Automate lifecycle management, updates, and access workflows, freeing your teams to focus on innovation, not infrastructure.
Delivering managed services at scale can get challenging fast if you aren’t prepared for it. Service providers must deploy complex cloud solutions across multiple customer environments, while ensuring security, governance, and speed. Manual processes, inconsistent configurations, and fragmented governance often slow delivery and erode customer confidence.
Azure Managed Applications change this. They give service providers a unified way to package, deploy, and manage solutions within customer subscriptions—complete with automated governance, lifecycle management, and built-in Azure policy enforcement. The result? Faster time-to-value, reduced operational overhead, and a scalable, repeatable service delivery model.
The Need for Standardizing Solution Delivery
You need clarity and momentum in your digital initiatives. One way to achieve it is by adopting a unified provisioning approach that enforces consistent governance controls across every customer subscription.
This strategy enables your teams to reduce configuration drift, accelerate security compliance checks, and minimize manual intervention when rolling out new features or patches.
Standardizing solution delivery through Azure Managed Applications ensures predictable outcomes and simplifies management of resource group assignments across diverse customer environments.
With a repeatable provisioning model, service providers can shift focus toward driving innovation rather than troubleshooting inconsistent infrastructure states that undermine reliability.
This governance centered model reduces operational overhead and positions your organization to scale Azure marketplace managed services offerings with confidence and control.
Deploy Azure Managed Applications today.
Core Capabilities of Azure Managed Applications
Azure Managed Applications provide scoped management models, isolated resource group deployment, turnkey packaging, and transactable marketplace plans to help Azure service providers deliver governed, repeatable, and monetizable solutions within customer subscriptions.
Scoped Management Models
Azure Managed Applications provide two access models that enable Azure service providers to retain or delegate control over managed workloads within customer subscriptions for clear operational boundaries and governance controls.
In the publisher-managed model, the Azure service providers maintain continuous administrative permissions on the managed resource group while customers retain read-only visibility into deployed artifacts and operations.
The customer-managed model maintains customer ownership of daily operations yet allows publishers to request elevated privileges through Azure just in time to access workflows when critical troubleshooting tasks are required by service teams.
Publishers can define these access scopes using Microsoft Entra role assignments and optional deny assignments to restrict actions on specific resources within the managed resource group context.
Managed Resource Group Isolation
All infrastructure for a managed application is deployed into a dedicated Azure resource group in the customer subscription to enforce isolation and to simplify Azure policy enforcement at a subscription level.
This managed resource group approach prevents unauthorized changes to other customer resources and allows the publisher’s operational scripts to execute only within the scoped boundary defined at deployment time.
Customers retain visibility into metadata and state of the managed resource group without risking cross-contamination with their core workloads or compliance controls on unrelated resource groups.
Turnkey Deployment Packaging
Azure Managed Applications packaging requires a bundle containing mainTemplate.json to define infrastructure and createUiDefinition.json to generate user input forms for deployment via the service catalog or Azure marketplace solutions metadata conventions.
Publishers package these artifacts into a zip file that is validated against schema requirements before publishing to Azure Partner Centre to ensure conformity with offer requirements and validation checks.
This standardized packaging enables Azure marketplace managed services offerings to be deployed consistently with minimal manual configuration while preserving customer governance and subscription policies.
Transactable Marketplace Plans
Publishers configure transactable plans in Azure Partner Centre offering both public and private visibility with flat monthly fees or usage-based billing dimensions for Azure marketplace managed services monetization strategies.
The Marketplace metering service API supports non-standard unit billing dimensions that report usage events via REST calls to ensure accurate customer billing and traceable operational metrics.
Accelerating Deployment: Quickstarts
This section provides step-by-step technical guidance enabling Azure service providers to provision Azure Managed Applications definitions rapidly through ARM templates or Bicep within Azure resource group contexts using CLI or Azure Partner Centre interfaces.
ARM Template Quickstart
An ARM Template QuickStart walkthrough enables Azure service providers to define, package, and publish Azure Managed Applications definitions to a service catalog or Azure marketplace solutions with minimal manual overhead using the Azure Partner Centre or CLI interfaces.
This QuickStart requires an active Azure subscription and appropriate Microsoft Entra role assignments granted to your service principal or user identity before you can author and validate ARM template deployments within your Azure resource group context.
- Create a file named json that defines the resources and configurations required for your managed application within the Azure Resource Group before publishing.
- Define portal user interfaces using json to present parameterized forms, validation rules, and managed service plan options for Azure marketplace managed services offerings.
- Publish the configured application definition to your internal service catalog or Azure marketplace solutions through the Azure Partner Centre to enable subscription-level deployments.
Bicep Quickstart
Authoring Azure Managed Applications definitions with Bicep enables your product and engineering teams to use a concise declarative syntax that compiles to ARM JSON while maintaining compatibility with Azure policy enforcement and Azure resource group governance models.
This QuickStart demonstrates how Azure service providers can develop mainTemplate.bicep, convert it to JSON via the bicep build command, package required artifacts, and publish through Azure CLI or Azure Partner Centre for Azure marketplace managed services offerings.
- Create a file named bicep and author resource declarations, parameter definitions, and module references that align with Microsoft solutions or applications’ requirements.
- Run the command bicep build mainTemplate.bicep locally or within a CI pipeline to generate a schema-compliant json file ready for packaging.
- Bundle the compiled JSON output and json into a ZIP archive and submit via az managedapp definition created or through the Azure Portal.
- Publish the Bicep-based managed application definition in the Azure Partner Centre to offer Azure marketplace solutions or internal catalog deployments across customer subscriptions.
Integrated Cross-Tenant Management
Implement cross-tenant management by combining Azure Managed Applications with Azure Lighthouse to deliver centralized operational control across customer subscriptions and managing tenants.
Azure Lighthouse Integration
Azure Lighthouse provides a logical projection that enables Azure service providers to manage resources in multiple customer tenants from within their own Microsoft Entra tenant context.
In this integration, publishers deploy an Azure Managed Applications definition targeting a dedicated Azure resource group in each customer subscription while retaining management capabilities through Azure Lighthouse delegation assignments.
Customers onboard Azure Lighthouse by deploying ARM templates or accepting a managed service offer in Azure Marketplace, which then grants service principals the required roles for cross-tenant operations across subscriptions.
This combined model supports Azure just-in-time access workflows to grant time-bound elevated permissions for troubleshooting managed resource group scopes under Azure policy enforcement rules.
Cross-Tenant Operations
Service providers can use Azure Lighthouse APIs and management tools such as Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell to list, access, and manage Azure Managed Applications deployed across multiple customer tenants from a single management plane.
Delegated subscriptions and resource groups appear in the service provider’s tenant with attributes indicating homeTenantId and managedByTenantIds, enabling programmatic filtering of Azure resource group scopes by tenant.
Key cross-tenant management tasks such as applying Azure policy enforcement definitions and assignments can be executed across all onboarded customer environments using centralized automation workflows triggered through Azure Lighthouse delegation processes.
Providers can monitor health metrics and receive alerts for multiple tenants from a unified dashboard in the Azure portal or through Azure Monitor for cross-tenant queries with remote workspace access.
- Automate backup and restore operations for customer virtual machines across tenants using Azure Backup center delegation through Azure Lighthouse.
- Use Azure Site Recovery to orchestrate disaster recovery scenarios across customer tenants with a single failover pipeline managed through the primary tenant context.
Operational Insights and Support
Operational insights and support capabilities within Azure Managed Applications give service providers comprehensive event telemetry and usage data from every managed resource group deployment.
Publishers can configure webhook endpoints to receive notifications for creating update delete events allowing robust automation of workflows triggered by lifecycle changes in their Managed Applications.
Alerts can also be configured in Azure Monitor to watch for abnormal metric or log patterns within the Azure resource group scope and notify operations teams proactively through email or webhook action groups.
This dual notification strategy ensures Azure service providers maintain visibility and control across their Azure marketplace managed services offerings with timely insights into application state and health.
Telemetry and Notifications
- Create events notify publishers immediately when a new Azure Managed Applications instance has been provisioned allowing downstream processes to register metadata or telemetry pipelines as part of onboarding workflows.
- Update events trigger after every successful template redeployment and can be used by Azure service providers to execute version compatibility checks or automated configuration validation within managed resource group contexts.
- Delete events occur when a managed application instance deletion is initiated by the customer, they allow cleanup tasks in external inventory systems and reclaim resource quotas across Azure marketplace solutions definitions.
- Deleting failed events inform publishers whenever resource deprovisioning encounters errors providing immediate feedback for operational support teams to investigate resource locks or policy violations in the Azure resource group.
Monitoring and Reporting
Azure Managed Applications integrate with Azure Monitor to send metrics and logs from each managed resource group instance to centralized data stores for near real time analysis and compliance validation.
Metrics such as throughput latency success counts and resource consumption are stored in Azure Monitor Metrics enabling Azure service providers to chart trends or trigger alerts based on threshold conditions within their Azure marketplace managed services offerings.
Diagnostic logs and audit records flow into Azure Monitor Logs where Kusto queries can extract operational insights across multiple tenants and subscriptions under Azure Lighthouse cross tenant management models.
Optional integration with Application Insights can provide application performance monitoring and distributed tracing for custom workloads running inside managed resource groups offering deep visibility into code level dependencies and user experiences.
- Azure portal dashboards display managed application instance status resource health and alert summaries in a single pane under the Managed Applications section, allowing publishers to assess deployment health quickly.
- Marketplace analytics available in the Azure Partner Centre present usage reports billing metrics and customer adoption trends for Azure marketplace solutions and Azure marketplace managed services offers.
Conclusion
Azure Managed Applications give service providers a powerful way to simplify complexity, enforce governance, and scale their managed services practice with confidence. By standardizing how you package, deploy, and manage solutions, you can accelerate delivery timelines, reduce operational risks, and unlock new opportunities to monetize your expertise.
Whether you’re looking to streamline internal service catalogs or launch transactable offers in the Azure Marketplace, the right strategy and tooling can help you deliver consistent value to your customers, faster and more securely.
Ready to take the next step? Let’s explore how Azure Managed Applications can transform your service delivery.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Question)
Azure Managed Applications let service providers package and deliver cloud solutions that run within a dedicated Azure resource group in the customer subscription. Infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and ongoing support are maintained by the publisher, while customers can access deployment parameters and monitor health metrics without altering core resources.
Service providers create a managed application definition in Azure Partner Centre by uploading a ZIP package containing mainTemplate.json and createUiDefinition.json. Partners configure plan options, pricing, and availability, then validate the package against schema requirements. Once approved, the managed application appears in the Azure marketplace for customer subscription deployment.
Azure Just in Time Access enables publishers to request temporary elevated permissions within the managed resource group for troubleshooting. Customers must enable JIT during deployment in Azure Partner Centre. Access duration and scope are approved by the customer, then automatically revoked once the time window closes, keeping least privilege for all operations.
Azure Policy enforcement applies policy definitions at the managed resource group level to audit or deny non-compliant settings during deployment and runtime. Policy assignments can be automated through createUiDefinition.json parameters. Azure service providers use policy assignments to maintain governance on each managed application instance within customer subscriptions.
Azure Monitor aggregates metrics and logs from each managed resource group instance into a central workspace. Service providers configure alerts and action groups for threshold breaches or anomalies. Usage and billing data for Azure marketplace managed services offers appear in Partner Centre analytics dashboards, providing insights on adoption trends and operational health.
