Managing Subscriptions in Azure

A subscription is a logical container that represents an agreement between you and Microsoft to use Azure services.

Managing subscriptions in Azure involves controlling access, monitoring usage and optimising costs across multiple Azure accounts.

Azure offers various subscription types, such as Pay-As-You-Go, Enterprise Agreement, and Microsoft Partner Network.

Each subscription is identified by a unique Subscription ID, which is used for management and billing purposes.

You can create and use subscriptions to organise resources by projects, departments, or environments.

RBAC can be implemented at subscription level, as well as resource tags, locks and policies.

Monitoring  and alerts can be applied to subscriptions to keep track of health, performance, and availability of resources within a subscription. Azure Monitor can be configured to send alerts based on certain conditions, such as when a resource exceeds a predefined usage threshold.

Subscription best practices

You can organise subscription by environment, eg. separating subscriptions for development, testing, and production environments will help avoid accidental changes.

Assigning different subscriptions to different departments or teams for works for better autonomy and accountability.

Grouping related applications or services within the same subscription for easier and better management.

Organisations with multiple subscriptions, can use management groups to simplify the governance and policy enforcement process.

Proactively manage costs by setting up budgets and alerts to avoid unexpected expenses.