Azure Daily 2022 by Gordon

General availability: VM Applications – Manage and deploy applications to VMs and VMSS

VM Apps is a service that simplifies the management, sharing, and global distribution of application packages at scale. The ability to manage application packages at scale is critical to you. Today, you can manage application packages in storage accounts. While this is secure and reliable, managing and deploying these packages at a scale is a challenge.

Using VM Apps, you can create and securely store application packages in an Azure Compute Gallery. The create experience is as simple as packaging all the application-related files (including install and uninstall scripts) in a compressed package and uploading it to Azure. Package management is simplified with logical grouping and versioning capabilities available with the feature. These packages can then be shared with other users in your organization, across subscriptions, and tenants, who can deploy them on VM. Shared Applications give you the flexibility to make application packages available to a VM, even if the VM is locked down with no internet access.

With VM Applications, you can now define application packages, replicate, share and deploy them automatically to your VMs and Virtual Machine Scale Sets using ARM templates, the portal, CLI, or PowerShell. Add an application to a VM or VMSS at creation, or add, remove, and update applications on existing resources.

This feature provides flexibility and simplicity in managing, sharing, and deploying applications. Some features include:

Support for pre-deployment applications settings, or a default configuration across all deployments.
Deploy VM Apps to VM or VMSS across subscriptions using IAM.
Package your applications and configuration in either page blobs or block blobs and replicate them across the desired regions.
Proxies all packages to prevent direct access to any of the replicas from the VM.
Ability to auto select “latest” available VM Apps version when installing an application.

Source: General availability: VM Applications – Manage and deploy applications to VMs and VMSS