Management Groups and Subscriptions
Organise Azure subscriptions into a management group hierarchy to apply policies and access controls consistently across an entire enterprise.
The Azure Resource Hierarchy
Azure organises resources into a four-level hierarchy. At the top are Management Groups — containers that group subscriptions for policy and access control at scale. Below are Subscriptions — billing and resource boundary units. Within subscriptions are Resource Groups — logical containers for related resources. At the bottom are Resources — individual services like VMs, databases, and storage accounts. Policies and permissions applied at higher levels cascade downward.
What Is an Azure Subscription?
An Azure subscription is both a billing unit and a logical resource boundary. All resource usage in a subscription is billed to a single invoice. Subscriptions set limits (quotas) on how many resources of each type can be deployed. Organisations commonly create separate subscriptions for different environments (Production, Development, Testing), different business units, or different geographic regions — each with its own cost reporting and access control.
# List all subscriptions you have access to
az account list --output table
# Switch to a specific subscription
az account set --subscription 'My Production Subscription'All lessons in this course
- Management Groups and Subscriptions
- Azure Policy
- Resource Tags and Resource Locks
- Azure Blueprints and Compliance