Azure – Resource and Resource group

Hello Friends,
We have discussed, about one of the most important and useful Microsoft Azure service, Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Before start with the ARM, we should know more about the popular terms, that comes to our mouth, when we are discussing about ARM.

Today in this blog we will discuss about two most important terms Azure Resource and Azure Resource Group.

Azure Resource:
Azure Resource is considered as a building block of the Microsoft Azure. It is a manageable item, that is available through Azure. A resource is something we provision in our Azure subscription and always belongs to a resource group. For example, a SQL Database, Web App, Storage Account, Virtual Machine, IoT Hub, and HDInsight are all examples of a resource as shown in the following figure.

Figure 1: Azure – Azure Resources

Azure Resource Group:
When we login to the new Azure Portal, it is possible to view resources (such as websites, virtual machines and databases) as a single logical unit. This logical unit of resource is called a Azure Resource Group. Almost everything within our Azure subscription exists within a set of resource groups.From Azure Portal, when we navigate to resource groups we should see a whole bunch listed as sown in the following figure.

Figure 2: Azure – Azure Resources Under one Resource Group Azure

Advantages of Azure Resource Groups:

Granular Permissions:
Permissions can be granted to each Resource Group, so other users can be granted access to only those resources that they need access to, and this can be restricted further by resource if required (giving access to manage the SQL DB only for example).

Detailed Billing:
An Azure administrator can more easily get accurate billing information for all the resources within the group, and for any particular application or service.

Repeatable Provisioning:
By using the ARM Template (we will discuss about ARM in our up coming article) we have a fully repeatable configuration of a given deployment and this is extremely valuable, especially for Dev/Test deployments. By having the ARM template, we can ensure that anytime a new Dev or Test deployment is required (which happens all the time), it can be achieved in moments and it will be identical to the previous environments.
This is also useful for Production environments, when you require the deployment of the exact same resource in different Azure regions- the same template can be run, just specifying the different Region at the time of deployment.

Hope this gives basic knowledge about, Azure Resource and Azure Resource Group.

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