Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides a hierarchical structure to organize resources for easy management and governance. The hierarchy consists of the following levels:
- Azure Tenants: At the highest level of the hierarchy, an Azure Tenant is a dedicated and isolated instance of Azure that is created for an organization or a company. It serves as the root level of the hierarchy and provides authentication and authorization for all resources in the tenant. The tenant is associated with a unique domain name and a directory that contains all the user accounts, groups, and applications for the organization. Each Azure Tenant can have multiple subscriptions.
- Subscriptions: Subscriptions are the basic unit of billing in Azure. They represent a logical container for Azure resources and services that are being used by an organization. Each subscription is associated with an Azure Active Directory tenant, and all resources and services are billed to the subscription. Subscriptions provide access control, billing and usage tracking, and resource limits.
- Resource Groups: Resource groups are logical containers that group related Azure resources together. They provide a way to organize and manage resources by project, environment, application, or any other category that makes sense for your organization. Resource groups also provide role-based access control (RBAC), allowing you to grant access to specific resources within a group to different users or groups. Resource groups can be created within a subscription and can contain resources from different regions.
- Resources: Resources are the individual components of Azure services that make up your applications. They can include virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, and more. Each resource is created within a resource group and is associated with a particular subscription. Resources can be managed individually or as part of a resource group, and they can be moved between resource groups or subscriptions as needed.
- Management Groups: Management groups are a way to organize and manage subscriptions at scale. They allow you to apply policies and access control across multiple subscriptions, making it easier to manage large Azure deployments. Management groups provide a hierarchy that can be used to group subscriptions together and apply policies and access control to all the subscriptions in the group. This is useful for enforcing governance and compliance across your Azure environment.
Azure provides a hierarchical structure that allows organizations to organize resources into logical groups for better management, governance, and access control. The hierarchy includes tenants, subscriptions, resource groups, resources, and management groups, with each level providing a more granular level of control and management.
