Azure subscriptions

Azure subscriptions are basically the billing accounts in Azure. Aside from billing, access to the Azure portal and the creation of the different Azure services in the portal are done through the use of Azure subscriptions. 

If you look at the Azure account hierarchy, you will see where Azure subscriptions actually fit in. In the following diagram, the account hierarchy is shown:

It is divided into Enterprise, Department, Accounts, and Subscriptions levels. In the following overview, you'll get an idea of what these different levels are for:

• Enterprise: This is also called the Enterprise Agreement, and is only used by organizations. It can be accessed from a separate portal (https://ea.azure.com) and is used for the whole organization to create the different departments.
• Departments: At the department level, sub-accounts for the different departments in your organization are created. You can also group your departments in a functional way, like an IT and finance department, or group them in a geographical way, like North America and Europe, for instance. You can add a department owner here, which will be the person in charge of owning the budget for the department, for instance.
• Accounts: This is where the different departments can create multiple accounts within their department. They can also add additional owners to manage these accounts. When you create a personal account in Azure, this is the starting point for creating the subscriptions. The Microsoft account that you use to log in to the Azure portal is then added to this account as the owner.
• Subscriptions: You can create multiple subscriptions in an account. This is the level where the actual billing takes place and where the different Azure resources are created. You can add additional subscription owners that can manage the subscriptions, create the different resources, and assign other users to the subscription. Subscriptions always have a trust relationship with an Azure Active Directory instance.

Inside the Azure subscription, you can create multiple resource groups. This will be covered in the next section.