Foundational Concepts in Microsoft Azure

Introduction

In this lesson, we’ll learn the foundational concepts of Microsoft Azure. These concepts are the basic building blocks of any Microsoft Azure-based solution, so it is crucial to develop a solid understanding of them before proceeding further.

Resources

In Microsoft Azure, resources are the building blocks of any Microsoft Azure solution. Every service and artifact in Microsoft Azure is a resource. Examples of resources are virtual machines and storage accounts. We can choose where we want to deploy our Microsoft Azure resource by specifying a region, as we will see soon.

Resource groups

Resource groups are containers that hold closely related resources together. They are used to logically organize resources that generally share the same life cycle to make it easy to manage as a group. Resource groups hold information about resources as meta-data.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are logical containers around resource groups. Several resource groups can be grouped under the same subscription. Each subscription is linked to a billing method: debit card, bank transfer, or free monthly credits. The billing method is used to pay for the cost of all resources under a specific Azure subscription.

Relationship among subscriptions, resource groups, and resources

The diagram below shows an example of a subscription, a resource group, and a resource in real life. In number 1, we have the resources representing the basic building blocks of our Microsoft Azure solutions. The icons represent different types of Microsoft Azure resources: application insights, SQL database, storage accounts, and app service. We do not need to bother about their details as of now. We just need to know these are called resources.