Understanding the Azure Resource Groups and Azure Resources
Introduction to Azure Resource Groups and Azure Resources. How they are related and what are they capable of.
Introduction
Once you have your Azure account and access to the Azure portal, you are ready to create your first Azure Resource Group and add some resources into it. You will also need a subscription. If you don’t have any of those things then I would recommend you to see my tutorial How to Create an Azure Account.
Azure Resource
Azure Resource is the manageable item in Azure. It includes things like Virtual Machines, Azure Storage Accounts, or Azure Web Service. The Azure resource is an instance of Azure Services.
There are three basic divisions of Azure Services.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
You can find more about divisions in my Introduction to Cloud Computing article.
Whenever Azure Service you want to use, you will find the resource for it. But first, you need the Azure Resource Group.
Azure Resource Group
Azure Resource Group is basically a container for Azure Resources. The resource can only exist in one resource group. Resources are not limited by region and can be from different regions. The resource group is not a physical grouping of resources.
Resources in the resource group share the same lifecycle, which means you can deploy, update and delete them together. Such operations are possible to do at the resource level too, but general guidance is that if the resource needs to exist on a different deployment cycle, it should be in another resource group.
Resources and resource groups can communicate across. For example, you have the Azure Web Service in one resource group and still can communicate with the Azure SQL Database from different resource groups.
The resource group is also suitable to set security boundaries for the whole group. What can be done with security can also be done with access control. You are able to assign access for the whole group and not for every resource separately.
The pretty cool feature is an export Infrastructure-as-code using Resource Manager Templates. But this I will save for the next time.
Sources
- Pluralsight course by Neil Morrissey.
- Microsoft Learn Platform.
