Organizing Resources in Azure

Organizing Resources in Azure⚑

Organizing your cloud-based resources is critical to securing, managing, and tracking the costs related to your workloads. To organize your resources, define a management group hierarchy, follow a well-considered naming convention and apply resource tagging.

Azure Management Groups and Hierarchy⚑

Azure provides four levels of management scope: 1. Management Groups 2. Subscriptions 3. Resource Groups 4. Resources

The following image shows the relationship of these levels:

Management groups: These groups are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions. All subscriptions in a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group.
Subscriptions: A subscription logically associates user accounts and the resources that were created by those user accounts. Each subscription has limits or quotas on the amount of resources you can create and use. Organizations can use subscriptions to manage costs and the resources that are created by users, teams, or projects.
Resource groups: A resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources like web apps, databases, and storage accounts are deployed and managed.
Resources: Resources are instances of services that you create, like virtual machines, storage, or SQL databases.

Scope of Management Settings⚑

You can apply management settings like policies and Azure role-based access control at any of the management levels. The level you select determines how widely the setting is applied. Lower levels inherit settings from higher levels. For example, when you apply a policy to a subscription, that policy is also applied to all resource groups and resources in that subscription.

Usually, it makes sense to apply critical settings at higher levels and project-specific requirements at lower levels. For example, you might want to make sure all resources for your organization are deployed to certain regions. To do that, apply a policy to the subscription that specifies the allowed locations. As other users in your organization add new resource groups and resources, the allowed locations are automatically enforced. Learn more about policies in the governance, security, and compliance section of this guide.

If you have only a few subscriptions, it's relatively simple to manage them independently. If the number of subscriptions you use increases, consider creating a management group hierarchy to simplify the management of your subscriptions and resources. For more information, see Organize and Manage your Azure Subscriptions.

As you plan your compliance strategy, work with people in your organization with these roles: security and compliance, IT administration, enterprise architecture, networking, finance, and procurement.

Create a Management Level⚑

You can create a management group, additional subscriptions, or resource groups.

Create a Management Group⚑

Create a management group to help you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions.

Go to Management groups.
Select Add management group.

Create a Subscription⚑

Use subscriptions to manage costs and resources that are created by users, teams, or projects.

Go to Subscriptions.
Select Add.

Subscriptions can also be created programmatically. For more information, see [Programmatically create Azure subscriptions](/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/programmatically-create-subscription).

Create a Resource Group⚑

Create a resource group to hold resources like web apps, databases, and storage accounts that share the same lifecycle, permissions, and policies.

Go to Resource groups.
Select Add.
Select the Subscription that you want your resource group created under.
Enter a name for the Resource group.
Select a Region for the resource group location.

Learn More⚑

To learn more, see:

Actions⚑

Create a management group:

Create a management group to help you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions.

Go to Management groups.
Select Add management group.

Create an additional subscription:

Use subscriptions to manage costs and resources that are created by users, teams, or projects.

Go to Subscriptions.
Select Add.

Create a resource group:

Create a resource group to hold resources like web apps, databases, and storage accounts that share the same lifecycle, permissions, and policies.

Go to Resource groups.
Select Add.
Select the Subscription that you want your resource group created under.
Enter a name for the Resource group.
Select a Region for the resource group location.

Naming Standards⚑

A good naming standard helps to identify resources in the Azure portal, on a billing statement, and in automation scripts. Your naming strategy should include business and operational details as components of resource names:

The business-related side of this strategy should ensure that resource names include the organizational information that's needed to identify the teams. Use a resource along with the business owners who are responsible for resource costs.

The operational side should ensure that names include information that IT teams need. Use the details that identify the workload, application, environment, criticality, and other information that's useful for managing resources.

Different resource types have different naming rules and restrictions. For more information and recommendations aimed specifically at supporting enterprise cloud adoption efforts, see the Cloud Adoption Framework's guidance on naming and tagging.

The following table includes naming patterns for a few sample types of Azure resources.

Avoid using any special characters (`-` or `_`) as the first or last character in any name. These characters cause most validation rules to fail.

Entity	Scope	Length	Casing	Valid characters	Suggested pattern	Example
Resource group	Subscription	1-90	Case insensitive	Alphanumeric, underscore, parentheses, hyphen, period (except at end), and Unicode characters	`<service short name>-<environment>-rg`	`profx-prod-rg`
Availability set	Resource group	1-80	Case insensitive	Alphanumeric, underscore, and hyphen	`<service-short-name>-<context>-as`	`profx-SQL-as`
Tag	Associated entity	512 (name), 256 (value)	Case insensitive	Alphanumeric	`"Key" : "value"`	`"Department" : "Central IT"`

Resource Tags⚑

Tags are useful to quickly identify your resources and resource groups.

You apply tags to your Azure resources to logically organize them by categories. Each tag consists of a name and a value.

For example, you can apply the name "environment" and the value "production" to all the resources in production. Tags should include context about the resource's associated workload or application, operational requirements, and ownership information.

After you apply tags, you can retrieve all the resources in your subscription with that tag name and value. When you organize resources for billing or management, tags can help you retrieve related resources from different resource groups.

You can also use tags for many other things. Common uses include:

Metadata and documentation: Administrators can easily see detail about the resources they're working on by applying a tag like ProjectOwner.
Automation: You might have regularly running scripts that can take an action based on a tag value like ShutdownTime or DeprovisionDate.
Cost optimization: You can allocate resources to the teams and resources who are responsible for the cost. In the Azure Cost Management + Billing, you can apply the cost center tag as a filter to report the charges based on a team or department usage.

Each resource or resource group can have a maximum of 50 tag name and value pairs. This limitation only applies to tags directly applied to the resource group or resource.

For more tagging recommendations and examples, see Recommended naming and tagging conventions in the Cloud Adoption Framework.

Apply a Resource Tag⚑

To apply a tag to a resource group:

Go to Resource groups.
Select a resource group.
Select Assign tags.
Enter a new name and value, or use the drop-down list to select an existing name and value.

Learn More⚑

To learn more, see Use tags to organize your Azure resources.

Action⚑

Apply a resource tag:

To apply a tag to a resource group:

Go to Resource groups.
Select a resource group.
Select Tags.
Enter a new name and value, or select an existing name and value.

Links: 020 - Development | MOC - Setup | Cloud Hosted Environments | Organize and Manage your Azure Subscriptions

Sources: Organize your Azure resources effectively - Cloud Adoption Framework | Microsoft Docs

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