Azure Subscriptions

• Need a subscription to use Azure and its products.

• Azure subscription - logical unit of Azure services that links to an Azure account, which is an identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or in a directory that an Azure AD trusts.

• Account can have one subscription or multiple subscriptions that have different billing models.

• Two types of subscription boundaries that you can use:

  • Billing boundary - Determines how an Azure account is billed for using Azure.

  • Access control boundary - Azure will apply access-management policies at the subscription level, and you can create separate subscriptions to reflect different organizational structures.

• Create additional subscriptions for resource or billing management purposes. For example, you might choose to create additional subscriptions for:

  • Environments: Create subscriptions to set up separate environments for development and testing, security, or to isolate data for compliance reasons. This is particularly useful because resource access control occurs at the subscription level.

  • Organizational structures: Create subscriptions to reflect different organizational structures. For example, you could limit a team to lower-cost resources, while allowing the IT department a full range.

  • Billing: Create additional subscriptions for billing purposes. Because costs are first aggregated at the subscription level, you might want to create subscriptions to manage and track costs based on your needs. For instance, you might want to create a subscription for your production workloads and another subscription for your development and testing workloads.

  • Subscription limits: Subscriptions are bound to some hard limitations.

• If you have multiple subscriptions, you can organize them into invoice sections. Each invoice section is a line item on the invoice that shows the charges incurred that month. For example, you might need a single invoice for your organization but want to organize charges by department, team, or project.