Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides a wide range of services for building, deploying, and managing applications and infrastructure in the cloud. One of the core concepts in Azure is the concept of resources and resource groups.
In Azure, a resource is a logical entity that represents a service or component that can be deployed and managed within an Azure subscription. Examples of Azure resources include virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, web apps, and networking components such as virtual networks, load balancers, and VPN gateways.
A resource group, on the other hand, is a logical container that groups together related Azure resources. Resource groups are used to manage and organize resources in Azure, and they provide a number of benefits such as simplified management, resource grouping, and access control.
When creating resources in Azure, they must be associated with a resource group. Resources within a resource group can be deployed, managed, and deleted together as a group, and they share common properties such as location and tags. Resource groups can also be used to apply access policies and to set up billing and cost tracking for resources.
Resource groups can be created through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, or programmatically using Azure Resource Manager templates. When creating a resource group, you must specify a name, location, and subscription to associate the resource group with.
Resource groups should be organized based on logical groupings of resources, such as by application or by environment (e.g. development, staging, production). This helps to simplify management and provides better visibility and control over resources in Azure.
In addition to managing resources within a resource group, Azure also provides a number of features for managing resource groups themselves. For example, resource groups can be moved between subscriptions or regions, and they can be deleted along with all of their associated resources.
Overall, the concept of resources and resource groups is an important one to understand when working with Azure. By using resource groups to organize and manage Azure resources, users can simplify management, improve security and compliance, and optimize costs and billing.
What is an Azure Resource Group
As the name implies, a Resource Group is a group of azure resources like virtual machines, app services, storage accounts, SQL databases etc. It’s a logical container for grouping related azure resources.
Azure Resource Group Example
Let’s say we are developing a web application. There are several ways to do this. To keep this example simple, let’s just assume we need the following 3 azure resources.
- Virtual Machine – To host and run our web application
- Storage Account – To store images, videos and other resources that our web application needs
- SQL database – To store our application data
Let’s say for this example sake we have the following environments. Most organisations have these deployment environments.
- Development
- Testing
- Staging
- PreProduction
- Production
Let’s say our web application name is PragimTech.com. We might create the following 4 resource groups, one for each environment.
- rg-pragimtech-development
- rg-pragimtech-staging
- rg-pragimtech-preproduction
- rg-pragimtech-production
We have the following naming pattern here. The prefix rg stands for resource group.
rg-<applicationName>-<deploymentEnvironment>
Grouping by deployment environment is just one way of grouping. Obviously you can group resources any way you want. Anyway that makes sense to your oragnisation really.
- By department,
- By country,
- By application,
- By resource type or a
- Combination of these