The Azure Marketplace has the ability to test drive anything that is deployed in the Azure Marketplace. As someone who has to sign up for an endless number of new accounts to be able to play with APIs and API services, I’m a big fan of the concept of a test drive–not just for web applications, or backend infrastructure, but specifically for individual APIs and microservices.
From the Azure site: Test Drives are ready to go environments that allow you to experience a product for free without needing an Azure subscription. An additional benefit with a Test Drive is that it is pre-provisioned - you don’t have to download, set up or configure the product and can instead spend your time on evaluating the user experience, key features, and benefits of the product.
I like it. I want more of these. I want to be able to test drive, then deploy any API I want. I don’t want to sign up for an account, enter my credit card details, talk to sales, or signup for 30 day trial–I want to test drive. I want it to have data in it, and be pre-configured for a variety of use cases. Helping me understand what is possible.
I want all the friction between me finding an API (discovery via marketplace) understanding what an API does, test driving, then deployment of the API in any cloud I want. I think we are still a little bit off from this being as frictionless as I envision in my head, but I hope with enough nudging we will get there very soon.
