What is a Microsoft Azure Subscription?

Microsoft provides an online management portal to manage the resources you deploy into Azure. You can use this portal to create virtual networks, use cloud services, set up VMs, set up storage accounts, define websites, and so on. In order to deploy and manage the resources to the Azure portal, you would require an Azure subscription.

An Azure subscription is a base container that comprises of a group of related business or technical resources. The group of resources are used and billed together. An Azure subscription also acts as an administrative boundary, meaning that it allows subscription administrators to access all resources within the subscription and delegate access through role-based access-control mechanisms.

Typically, each Azure organization is given an Azure AD tenant, can create Azure Accounts, and can create different subscriptions for the use of different services. An organization can have many tenants. Each tenant can have many accounts, and every account can use multiple subscriptions.