Picture Credit: Azure Deployments & Governance
Governance in Azure ensures that resources and services are deployed, managed, and secured according to organizational standards. Implementing effective governance involves a combination of tools that help you enforce policies, manage access, monitor costs, and organize resources. Below are the key elements involved in establishing governance in Azure:
- Management Groups
If your organization has many subscriptions, you may need a way to efficiently manage access, policies, and compliance for those subscriptions. This can be done through the Management Group. Management Groups in Azure help simplify and ease governance at scale by organizing your subscriptions based on different criteria. The structure of management groups can be created based on:
- Business Units
- Geographies
- Environments, etc.
By using management groups, you can apply policies, role-based access control (RBAC), and other governance mechanisms across multiple subscriptions, making governance more streamlined.
2. Subscription
An Azure Subscription is essentially a legal contract and acts as a "container" for your resources within Azure. It serves as an administrative boundary, allowing you to manage access and billing for the resources created under that subscription. Subscriptions help organize and isolate different projects or departments within an organization, making it easier to control permissions and budgets.
3. Resource Groups
Resource Groups are logical groupings or containers for resources that share the same lifecycle. They allow you to organize resources like virtual machines, storage accounts, and databases, making it easier to manage and monitor them as a unit, and constantly check your signatures and resources to ensure that everything complies with corporate rules.
Key Facts:
Resource Groups can hold metadata and may be created in a different region than the resources they contain.
They do not create a communication boundary, meaning resources within different resource groups can still communicate with one another, unlike subscriptions, which serve as stronger administrative boundaries.RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
4. RBAC
It provides a granular level of access control in Azure, allowing you to assign roles to users, groups, or services at various scopes—management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, or individual resources. RBAC helps ensure that only authorized individuals can perform certain actions on your resources.
5. Policy
Azure Policies are rules that define what can and cannot be done in an environment. They enforce governance by restricting resource creation or controlling the configuration of existing resources. Policies can be applied at any level in the hierarchy—whether at the management group, subscription, or resource group level.
How They Work:
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is used for enforcement and auditing.
Policies consist of conditions based on resource attributes and an effect (e.g., Audit, Allow, Deny, Append, DeployIfNotExists).
These policies ensure compliance with organizational standards and help in managing resources at scale.
6. Blueprints
It helps you to configure your cloud environment so that it is managed properly and deployed in a repeatable manner. It allows a kind of implementation of governance as a code. Subscriptions are made available to development teams or departments as they are created. The goal here is that, when teams are presented with a subscription controlled by Blueprints, the amount of time they need to take from initial subscription settings, permits, policies, etc. to implementing the project in production decreases dramatically.
7. Resource Graph
It provides powerful insights into your cloud resources across your entire organization. It allows you to query and explore the current state of your resources, making it easier to monitor and manage them at scale. It is a Big Data technology that brings the configurations of all your resources from your cloud environment and offers you, through a structured query language, the ability to explore your environment very quickly, allowing visibility at scale over all of your environment.
8. Cost Management
It Helps you understand your Azure invoice, monitor and control spending, and optimize resource usage. It allows you to analyze costs, create and manage budgets, export data, examine recommendations, and act on them.