AZURE ACCOUNTS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

An Azure account is tied to a specific identity and holds information like:

• Name, email, and contact preferences

• Billing information such as a credit card

An Azure account is what you use to sign in to the Azure website and administer or deploy services.
Every Azure account is associated with one or more subscriptions. An Azure subscription is a logical
container used to provision resources in Microsoft Azure. It holds the details of all your resources
like virtual machines, databases, etc.

An Azure subscription has a trust relationship with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which means
that the subscription trusts Azure AD to authenticate users, services, and devices. Multiple
subscriptions can trust the same Azure AD directory, but each subscription can only trust a single
directory.

>Every Azure Subscription includes:

• Free access to billing and subscription support

• Azure products and services documentation

• Online self-help documentation

• Community support forums

AZURE FREE SUBSCRIPTION

An Azure free subscription includes a $200 credit to spend on any service for the first 30 days, free
access to the most popular Azure products for 12 months, and access to more than 25 products that
are always free. This is an excellent way for new users to get started. To set up a free subscription,
you need a phone number, a credit card, and a Microsoft account.

AZURE PAY-AS-YOU-GO SUBSCRIPTION

A Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) subscription charges you monthly for the services you used in that billing
period. This subscription type is appropriate for a wide range of users, from individuals to small
businesses, and many large organizations as well.

PAY-AS-YOU-GO DEV/TEST

Designed for the needs of teams of Visual Studio subscribers, the Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test offer
allows you to quickly get your team up and running with dev/test environments in the cloud using
pre-configured virtual machines, including Windows 10, and low rates on virtual machines, Cloud
Services, SQL Database, HDInsight, App Service and Logic Apps. You have the flexibility to create
multiple Azure subscriptions based on this offer, enabling you to maintain isolated environments
and a separate bill for different projects or teams.

This offer is exclusively for active Visual Studio subscribers and is limited to development and testing
only. This benefit is exclusively for development and testing your applications. Usage within the
subscription does not carry a financially-backed SLA, except for use of Visual Studio Team Services
and HockeyApp.

AZURE ENTERPRISE AGREEMENT

An Enterprise Agreement provides flexibility to buy cloud services and software licenses under one
agreement, with discounts for new licenses and Software Assurance. It’s targeted at enterprise-scale
organizations.

AZURE FOR STUDENTS SUBSCRIPTION

An Azure for Students subscription includes $100 in Azure credits to be used within the first 12
months plus select free services without requiring a credit card at sign-up. You must verify your
student status through your organizational email address.

USING MULTIPLE AZURE SUBSCRIPTIONS

You can create multiple subscriptions under a single Azure account. This is particularly useful for
businesses because access control and billing occur at the subscription level, not the account level.
AUTHENTICATE ACCESS WITH AZURE ACTIVE DIRECTORY

As you’ve seen, your Azure account is a globally unique entity that gives you access to your Azure
subscriptions and services. Authentication for your account is performed using Azure Active
Directory (Azure AD). Azure AD is a modern identity provider that supports multiple authentication
protocols to secure applications and services in the cloud.

Users, applications, and other entities registered in Azure AD aren’t all lumped into a single global
service. Instead, Azure AD is partitioned into separate tenants. A tenant is a dedicated, isolated
instance of the Azure Active Directory service, owned and managed by an organization. When you
sign up for a Microsoft cloud service subscription such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Intune, or
Office 365, a dedicated instance of Azure AD is automatically created for your organization.

When it comes to Azure AD tenants, there is no concrete definition of “organization” — tenants can
be owned by individuals, teams, companies, or any other group of people. Tenants are commonly
associated with companies. If you sign up for Azure with an email address that’s not associated with
an existing tenant, the sign-up process will walk you through creating a tenant, owned entirely by
you.

Azure AD tenants and subscriptions have a many-to-one trust relationship: A tenant can be
associated with multiple Azure subscriptions, but every subscription is associated with only one
tenant. This structure allows organizations to manage multiple subscriptions and set security rules
across all the resources contained within them.

Here’s a simple representation of how accounts, subscriptions, tenants, and resources work
together:
Azure Support Plans

Every Azure subscription includes free access to billing and subscription support, Azure products and
services documentation, online self-help documentation, white papers, and community support
forums.

>Microsoft offers four support plans that can provide you with technical support:

Basic: Available to all Microsoft Azure accounts, this is the only free plan and does not have any
active support from Azure, the user has access to community forums, self-help documentation etc.,
and can raise as many support tickets as required.

Developer: Best suggested for trial and non-production environments, this plan has active support
from Azure in the form of access to support engineers via email during standard Business hours. The
response time from Microsoft for this plan is within eight hours.

• Reactive technical support

Standard: Best suggested for production workload environments, this plan is an upgrade of the
developer plan and provides support in the form of 24×7 access to support engineers via email and
phone. The response time from Microsoft for this plan is within one hour.

• Ability to submit support issues 24x7

Professional Direct: Absolutely necessary for business-critical environments, this plan also offers
24/7 technical support with one-hour response time but also includes operational support, training,
and proactive guidance from a ProDirect delivery manager.

• Fastest initial response of one hour or less for high-severity support requests
• Escalation management for priority issues
• Pooled team of ProDirect Managers provide account management

If you have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, you can purchase any of these plans except the
Developer plan and the bill will be incorporated in the enterprise agreement.
Alternative Support Channels

Apart from the official support provides by Microsoft, here are a few other places that you can ask
for support or look for your queries:

▪ Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Azure Forums

Out of all these, Stack Overflow is the most recommended option as it is a forum created by
developers, for developers.

For more details, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/support/plans.