An Azure subscription is a logical unit that links user accounts and resources to an Azure account. It acts as a central container for billing, access control, and resource management. Subscriptions play a key role in organizing, tracking, and controlling your use of Azure services.
What Is an Azure Subscription?
A subscription allows you to group Azure services and user accounts under a common administrative and billing framework. All usage of resources—like virtual machines, storage, and databases—is tied to a specific subscription.
Why Use Subscriptions?
Subscriptions are useful for many different scenarios:
- Billing Model: Track costs for specific teams or projects. You can view invoices and usage at the subscription level.
- Access Control Model: Apply role-based access control (RBAC) policies to manage who can access and modify resources. See #topic 38# for more on RBAC.
- Departmental Separation: Assign subscriptions to individual departments (e.g., HR, IT, Finance) to isolate responsibilities.
- Environment Segregation: Use different subscriptions to separate development, testing, and production environments.
- Compliance and Data Separation: Ensure data and users are isolated based on regulatory or geographic requirements.
This flexibility makes subscriptions a practical tool for governance and cost control.
Quotas and Limits
Subscriptions come with a set of limits and quotas:
- These include the number of resources allowed per region, such as VMs or storage accounts.
- Some limits are hard, while others are soft and can be raised through support requests.
Understanding these boundaries helps you plan and scale your workloads efficiently.
Subscriptions vs. Management Groups
While both subscriptions and management groups support governance, there are key differences:
- Like management groups, subscriptions can be used to apply policies and enforce compliance.
- Unlike management groups, subscriptions cannot be nested. Each subscription is a standalone unit within the hierarchy.
To see how subscriptions fit into Azure’s structure, refer to AZ-900: Describe the hierarchy of resource groups, subscriptions, and management groups.
Conclusion
Azure subscriptions are essential for organizing services, controlling access, managing costs, and meeting compliance needs. By using multiple subscriptions, you can tailor your Azure environment to meet technical and business requirements.
Ready to master Azure’s subscription model? Join us in our AZ-900 “Azure Fundamentals” video course, or go back to our AZ-900 Topic List.
Please click here to find out more about Microsoft’s AZ-900 exam.
