Azure Tenant, Subscriptions and Resource Groups!

An Azure Tenant is an instance of Azure Active Directory. This will typically use your organisation name and be the top level for all your Azure resources.

Your tenant must be unique, so if you have a similar name to another business you may not be able to use it. Also bear in mind that if you do some experimenting and then want to start again, when you delete a tenant it takes 30 days to purge from the Microsoft platform and you would have to wait for that to happen to start again using the same name.

The best place to start is with a 30 day free trial, you can only have one free trial so decide if you want experiment with a test name or go in at the deep end and set up your production tenant. If you are new to Azure I would setup a test and production tenant so you have your free learning resources and your production name reserved. As you decide how you want to use each resource you can then replicate to production.

Subscriptions are the billing level within a tenant and can be an Enterprise Agreement billed by Microsoft, a CSP agreement billed by a Microsoft Partner or a Pay as you Go billed directly to your credit card.

You can have multiple subscriptions within a tenant and this can be useful for managing the costs for different business units, whether they be divisions, departments or particular business services.

Resource Groups are the container for your resources for a service. I typically use these as security boundaries.

So what this might look like on the Azure platform

Tenant: Contoso (contoso.onmicrosoft.com)

Subscriptions:
– Infrastructure (the underlining services
– Marketing (for marketing department services)
– Finance (for finance department services)
– etc

Resource Groups:
– Infrastructure
– Networking
– Identity Services
– Management Services
– File Services
– Remote Desktop Services
– etc