Last week I started a multi-part series on Today I Learned (TIL) about Microsoft Azure. This is part two of what I am learning in Azure.

Today’s topic is simply about Tenants, Subscriptions, Subscription Roles, Resource Groups, and Tags.

It’s Always Good to Start with Pictures

Here is a glimpse of how these topics relate. I will define and explain each below.

What is a Tenant?

In simplest terms, a Tenant is container for multiple subscriptions. An example of two subscriptions would be Azure and Office 365. They would be owned by one account, an individual or a company. A very large enterprise may use multiple subscriptions to better manage billing between divisions.

What Are Azure Subscriptions?

Basically, it’s just an ownership account. Think of it as just creating a billing and usage management account, whether it is a personal subscription or an enterprise level. The account allows you to group and manage multiple subscriptions for billing and reporting.

A subscription can encompass a mix IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services. All subscription management, reviewing billing reports, and creating new subscriptions can be done through http://account.windowsazure.com site, but you need to be an account administrator.

How Do I Get Subscriptions?

You can get them through a Trial, MSDN, Pay as you go using a credit card, Azure Resellers (called Cloud Solution Providers or CSPs) or Enterprise Agreements.

What are the Subscription Server Roles?

Microsoft offers roles based on “Least Privilege” within Azure at the subscription level. There are several roles that secure the access to your cloud environment. These three main accounts below are all very powerful accounts and should be limited to only a few.

The top role is the Account Administrator. Think of this account in terms of what Enterprise Administrator is in your on-premises Active Directory. The Account Administrator has full rights. They have access to the account’s full financials and billing information for all subscriptions within the account, they can also create, delete and modify subscriptions.

The next role is the Service Administrator. This role is like the Domain Admin. It’s one level down from the account administrator and has full rights to the services in the subscription. They can do everything an account administrator can do with few exceptions, such as viewing the billing details of the subscription.

There is also the role of a Subscription or Co-administrator. This role is like System Admin(SA) in SQL Server. This role can create and delete resources within the subscription but has no control over billing or the ability to change the authentication source such as AD.

The three accounts above control the Role Based Access (RBAC) for the rest of the users accounts on a resource level. They can assign users or groups of users, the rights to manage only the resources they need for their particular roles. These are roles such as Owner, Contributor and Reader of a resource group.

What’s a Resource Group?

A resource group is a container that can that hold resources into groups. Things that can exist in this container are thing like VMs, NICS, Storage, Web Apps, SQL and Virtual Networks (VNETS). The “objects” within a resource group can be created, updated, and deleted as a group. One easy example of a resource group can be a development environment, all parts associated to that environment are contained in that in resource group.

What is a Tag?

The next granular level of organizing are Tags. These allow for adding your own meta-data to objects in Azure. Think of these as labels or categories for reporting and organizing things like billing. For instance, if the resource groups within an ERP environment are tagged as “ERP”, then those resource groups would get categorized together for management purposes. If you’ve ever used extended properties in SQL Server this is the same basic concept. There are however limits to the amount of tags an individual resource can have, which is currently 15. Your Azure billing statement is grouped by tags, which makes this almost a mandatory feature.

Summary

In this part we covered Tenants, Subscriptions, Subscription Roles, Resource Groups, and Tags. Hopefully you got a basic understanding of each and how the relate to each other. Next, I will dive a little into the differences between Azure SQL Database and SQL Server on IaaS.