Last updated: May 2026

Azure Fundamentals Beginner AZ-900 ⏱ 12 min read

Azure Subscriptions

A Resource Group is a folder for your resources. But what's the folder that holds all your Resource Groups? That's an Azure Subscription. Subscriptions are the billing and access boundary in Azure — every resource you create belongs to a subscription, and that subscription is what gets the monthly bill. Understanding subscriptions is essential for managing Azure at scale.

What you'll learn What an Azure Subscription is · The relationship between subscriptions, resource groups, and resources · Types of Azure subscriptions · When to use multiple subscriptions · Subscription limits and quotas · How billing works at the subscription level · Subscription best practices

Table of Contents

What is an Azure Subscription?
The Azure Hierarchy
Types of Azure Subscriptions
When to Use Multiple Subscriptions
Subscription Limits & Quotas
How Billing Works
Managing Subscriptions
Best Practices
Practice Questions

What is an Azure Subscription?

An Azure Subscription is a logical unit of Azure services that is linked to an Azure account. It serves two key purposes:

Billing boundary — All resources in a subscription are billed together. Each subscription generates its own monthly invoice.
Access control boundary — You can apply policies and access controls at the subscription level that affect all resources within it.

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Simple Analogy Think of a Subscription like a bank account. A Resource Group is a category in that account (food, rent, transport). Individual resources are transactions. All transactions are charged to the bank account — and you get one statement per account per month.

The Azure Hierarchy

Azure has a clear organisational hierarchy. Understanding it is fundamental to managing Azure at any scale:

Level	What It Is	Example
Management Group	Container for multiple subscriptions	Root MG → Production MG
Subscription	Billing and access control boundary	Contoso Production Subscription
Resource Group	Logical container for related resources	rg-webapp-prod
Resource	Individual Azure service	myVM, myStorageAccount

Policies, access controls, and cost tracking can be applied at any level — and they inherit downward. A policy applied to a subscription applies to all Resource Groups and resources within it.

Types of Azure Subscriptions

Type	Who It's For	Key Features
Free	New users learning Azure	$200 credits for 30 days, 12 months free services
Pay-As-You-Go	Individuals and small businesses	Pay only for usage, no commitment
Enterprise Agreement (EA)	Large enterprises (>500 seats)	Volume discounts, committed spend, central billing
Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)	Customers buying through Microsoft partners	Partner-managed billing, often discounted
Visual Studio / Dev/Test	Developers with Visual Studio subscriptions	Discounted dev/test rates, not for production
Student	Verified students	$100 credits, no credit card required

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For Learning Start with a Free subscription. Once your credits expire, it converts to Pay-As-You-Go. If you're a student, the Azure Student subscription is even better — $100 credits with no credit card required.

When to Use Multiple Subscriptions

A single organisation can have many Azure subscriptions. Here are the most common reasons to use multiple:

Environment Separation

Keep development, staging, and production in separate subscriptions. This creates a hard billing and access boundary — a dev mistake cannot accidentally affect production, and you get separate invoices per environment.

Department / Business Unit Billing

Each business unit (Engineering, Marketing, Finance) gets its own subscription so their Azure spend appears as separate invoices. This makes internal chargeback simple.

Subscription Limits

Each subscription has resource limits (quotas). For example, a single subscription can have a maximum of 980 Resource Groups. High-scale organisations hit these limits and need multiple subscriptions.

Regulatory / Compliance Boundaries

Some organisations keep regulated workloads (healthcare data, financial data) in a dedicated subscription with strict policies, completely isolated from regular workloads.

Geographic / Regional Isolation

Multinational organisations may have separate subscriptions per country to manage local compliance requirements and give regional teams autonomy.

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Multiple Subscriptions + Management Groups Once you have multiple subscriptions, managing policies across all of them becomes complex. This is where Management Groups come in — they let you apply policies and access controls across multiple subscriptions at once. Covered in the next tutorial.

Subscription Limits & Quotas

Every Azure subscription has default limits on the number of resources you can create. These are called quotas. Here are key ones to know:

Resource	Default Limit per Subscription
Resource Groups	980
Virtual Machines (per region)	25,000 vCPUs
Storage Accounts (per region)	250
Virtual Networks	1,000
Azure Active Directory tenants	1 per subscription

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Quota Increases Most quotas can be increased by submitting a support request in the Azure Portal. Go to Help + Support → New support request → Service and subscription limits (quotas). Microsoft usually approves increases quickly for valid business needs.

How Billing Works

Every subscription has a billing cycle — typically monthly. At the end of each cycle, Azure generates an invoice for all resource usage within that subscription during that period.

Billing Account Structure

Billing Account — Created when you sign up for Azure. One per company or individual.
Billing Profile — Contains payment method and invoice settings. You can have multiple billing profiles.
Invoice Section — Organises charges within a billing profile by department or project.
Subscription — Linked to an invoice section. All resource charges roll up here.

Azure CLI List all subscriptions in your account

az account list --output table

Azure CLI Show the currently active subscription

az account show

Managing Subscriptions

You can manage subscriptions from the Azure Portal under Subscriptions (search in the top bar). From there you can:

View all subscriptions linked to your account
See spending and budgets per subscription
Assign access roles at the subscription level
Apply Azure Policies
Cancel or transfer a subscription

Best Practices

Separate prod from non-prod — At minimum, use different subscriptions for production and development/test
Use Management Groups — Once you have 3+ subscriptions, use Management Groups to apply policies centrally
Name subscriptions clearly — E.g., Contoso-Production, Contoso-Dev-Test, Contoso-Shared-Services
Assign an owner — Every subscription should have a designated owner who is responsible for its costs and governance
Set budgets — Configure monthly budget alerts on every subscription

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AZ-900 Exam Tip Know that a Subscription is both a billing boundary and an access control boundary. Know the hierarchy: Management Groups → Subscriptions → Resource Groups → Resources. Know that one Azure account can have multiple subscriptions.

📝 Practice Questions

Click an option to check your answer. AZ-900 style questions.

Q1. What are the two primary purposes of an Azure Subscription?

A A physical data centre location and a security firewall

B A billing boundary and an access control boundary

C A container for virtual machines and a network boundary

D A backup policy boundary and a monitoring boundary

Q2. What is the correct order of the Azure resource hierarchy from highest to lowest level?

A Resources → Resource Groups → Subscriptions → Management Groups

B Management Groups → Subscriptions → Resource Groups → Resources

C Management Groups → Resource Groups → Subscriptions → Resources

D Subscriptions → Management Groups → Resource Groups → Resources

Q3. A large enterprise wants to ensure development teams cannot accidentally affect production resources. What is the recommended approach?

A Put dev and prod resources in different Resource Groups within the same subscription

B Use separate subscriptions for development and production

C Deploy dev and prod in different Azure regions

D Create separate billing accounts for dev and prod

Q4. Can a single Azure account have multiple subscriptions?

A Yes — one account can have multiple subscriptions

B No — each account is limited to one subscription

C Yes — but only up to 3 subscriptions per account

D Only with an Enterprise Agreement — not with Pay-As-You-Go

Q5. What is the default maximum number of Resource Groups per Azure Subscription?

A 100

B 500

C 980

D Unlimited

← Previous Azure Resource Groups Next → Azure Management Groups

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