Azure Subscription

Hi guys today we are going to understand about Azure Subscription.

As posted in the previous blog we have learnt what is Microsoft Azure, it’s uses and advantages so today’s topic is about Azure subscription. So azure subscription is a logical unit of Azure services that are linked to an azure account. Billing of the services provided are managed per-subscription basis. In other words, managing the account’s resources and billing information is done via subscription. Each subscription is added to the azure active directory and associated with it.

Azure Active Directory:

It is a service for maintaining multiple users also called as tenants. It provides organizations of all sizes an affordable and easy to use means of enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) to thousands of first and third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like Office 365, Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Concur and others. For organizations building their own applications, Azure AD can be easily integrated providing a world-class identity solution.

In addition to SSO, Azure AD has enhanced capabilities for robust identity management and security, such as multi-factor authentication, self-service password reset, privileged identity management, role-based access control, application usage monitoring, auditing and security monitoring and alerting.

Each Azure active directory users has of three types. These are also called as Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

·       Reader

·       Contributor

·       Owner

Reader: This type of user has only limited access to view but can’t make any changes. Granting a specific set of guest users read access instead of granting it to all guest users. Granting a specific set of non-admin users access to Azure portal when "Restrict access to Azure AD portal to admins only" is set to "Yes" like a read-only access.

Contributor: Can create and manage all types of Azure resources but can't grant access to others. Azure portal, click All services and then select Users or Groups. Click the user or group you want list the role assignments for. Click Azure resources. You see a list of roles assigned to the selected user or group at various scopes such as management group, subscription, resource group, or resource.

Owner: Has full access to all resources including the right to delegate access to others. Let’s you manage everything, including access to resources.

So, subscription is the billing unit for the services that are used in the account. So there totally three types of Azure subscriptions.

·       Available

·       Free

·       Pay-as-you-go

Requirements for Subscription:

All you need is a phone number, a credit card and a GitHub account or Microsoft account username. If not, you can signup from the azure portal from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/features/azure-portal/ and click on Free account -> Start free you will reach the signup wizard you can use any Microsoft account else you can create your own one.

Free Trial:

First time as you have logged into the azure portal you will be having a free trial of one month with a ?13,300 credit you can spend during the first 30 days. The products that are free for a month are

·       Virtual Machines (Windows, Linux) free for 750 hours

·       Managed storage disks

·       Blob storage

·       File storage

·       SQL databases

·       Azure Cosmos DB

·       Bandwidth Networking (Data transfer)

Credit balance in the free account:

So, while using the free account you will be notified each and every time you login to the azure account with how much credit you are left with. The remaining credit is shown at the top of the management portal, so you always know where you are at. End of 30 days if any amount is left out the it will be wasted so before the span of 30 days if the account is converted to pay-as-you-go the unused credit will remain and can be used.

Pay-as-you-go:

At the end of your first 30 days, you can continue using your free products after you upgrade your account to a pay-as-you-go pricing and remove the spending limit. If you stay within the service quantities included for free, you will not have to pay anything. The ?13,219.25 free credit acts as a spending limit. Azure will notify the user so the user can decide if you want to upgrade to pay-as-you-go pricing and remove the spending limit. If user wants to continue, user will have access to all the free products. If user doesn’t, user’s account and products will be disabled and user will need to upgrade to resume usage. Azure will notify the user so that user can decide if they want to upgrade to pay-as-you-go pricing and remove the spending limit. If yes user will have access to all the free products. If no user account and products will be disabled and he/she will need to upgrade to resume usage. So once the account is upgraded to pay-as-you-go model the spend limit will be removed from the account and user pays for what you use beyond the free amounts and this is charged to the card you provided. The charges incurred only for the services used. User can use all types of services in this model.

How to check the azure subscription type:

Login to the Azure portal and in the search for subscriptions and select the subscription that user has signed up during free account creation. Refer the table showing the free service usage.

Azure Billing:

Each billing period, you normally receive an invoice in email. The invoice is a representation of your Azure bill. The same cost information on the invoice is available in the Azure portal. You must have a billing account for a Microsoft Customer Agreement.

You must have access to a Microsoft Customer Agreement. You must be a billing profile Owner, Contributor, Reader, or Invoice manager to view billing and usage information. One must be subscribed for more than 30 days from the day that you to create the Azure account. Azure bills you at the end of your invoice period.In the portal you can search for Cost Management + Billing. You will find the cost incurred for what are all the resource used during the time period.

Cancelling the Subscription:

In order to cancel the subscription, you can cancel it any time provided user has taken the backup of necessary data and save it in the local machine. One must verify the following:

·       Data used is backed up to the local machine or external storage.

·       All the azure services are stopped.

·       All resources in the resource groups are deleted.

·       All custom roles are removed before cancelling the subscription.

Steps for cancelling subscription:

• Select your subscription from
• Select the subscription that you want to cancel.
• Select Overview, and then select Cancel subscription. 

• Follow prompts and finish cancellation.

So, hope this blog will help you to understand the Azure subscription and its features and about Active directory. If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you!