Setting up Management Group for production in enterprise

org1Once you have set up your first subscription, you can set up your Management Group.

In Azure, management groups are a way to group your subscriptions. When you apply policies and governance to your management group, all of the subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied. Enterprises want management groups as a way to scale your operations no matter how many subscriptions you may have.

For example, you may want to restrict the regions available for your resources to those within a particular region. A policy that reflects that can be applied to a management group and will automatically be applied to all management groups, all subscriptions, and all resources under that management group.

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Organize Azure resources using management group, tags, naming convention

org1Once you have set up your Azure administrators, you can begin to consider how to organize your cloud into management groups, subscriptions, resource groups. You will want to develop a naming standard, and way to tag resources.

Although you may be focused initially on just getting your resources deployed, you will want to be able to manage them. For example, a year from now you may want to know who is responsible for the virtual machine that is no longer doing anything, but is costing money. In other words, you may want lifecycle management.

You may want the ability to charge a set of resources to a cost center and to budget those resources. For example, you may want to receive alerts for both the users and for your administrators when costs are out of line with expectations.

And as we all know, it is easier to organize as you go. In this article, you will learn about some key points in organizing your Azure resources.

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Checklist of Azure tools for enterprise admin: PowerShell, AzCopy, Azure CLI, Docker, Git, Azure Providers

powershellAzure provides the Azure Cloud Shell which includes almost every tool you will need already installed. But that requires you to be logged into the portal. And it times out after a short time. So you can administer Azure from your desktop.

There are tools you will normally want on your local computer to administer Azure:

  • PowerShell
  • Azure Powershell
  • Azure CLI and some additional tools (such as jq and Kubernetes)
  • AzCopy
  • Git
  • Docker
  • Visual Studio Code and extensions

All are cross platform tools. In this article, you will learn how to install the tools from the command line. And you will learn about Azure providers and how to add them to your subscription.

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Getting started with Azure and Azure Active Directory using PowerShell

You can start working with Azure in the Azure portal. But soon, you will need PowerShell (or the Azure CLI) to explore the power of Azure. Not everything you can do shows up in the portal. In fact, the features are all exposed through the Azure scripts first.
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