Managing a handful of subscriptions within your organisation can be relatively simple. However, in larger organisations, where numerous employees and multiple applications are at play, the situation becomes more complex. When each employee is granted Azure subscriptions and has the freedom to create Azure resources without constraints, it can quickly lead to challenges in control, tracking, and management. Unchecked resource creation can result in escalating costs that become difficult to contain.
To address this issue, Azure introduced a hierarchical structure comprising four distinct levels of management scope. These management scopes are designed to provide organisation, security, streamlined administration, and cost monitoring, ensuring that Azure resources are efficiently governed within the organisation’s ecosystem.
Management Groups
Within a management group, every subscription automatically adopts the predefined conditions and settings established at the management group level. Think of a management group as a centralised container that encompasses all your subscriptions, offering a cohesive framework for unified management. Similar to the possibility of having multiple subscriptions, a business can also have multiple management groups to accommodate varying structural needs and configurations.
Subscriptions
A subscription resides within a management group, linking user accounts to the resources generated by those users. Each subscription comes with predefined limits or quotas that dictate the extent of resources that can be generated and utilized. Subscriptions offer organizations a valuable tool for cost management and resource oversight, enabling efficient control over the resources brought into existence by users, teams, or projects.
Resource Groups
As the name suggests, a resource group serves as a collective assembly of interconnected Azure resources. Essentially, it functions as a logical container where various Azure resources, such as web apps, databases, and storage accounts, are deployed and centrally managed.
Resources
An Azure resource encompasses any service instance that you establish. This can include a wide range of services, such as virtual machines, Azure SQL databases, storage accounts, and more.
