Terminology

Azure is a complete cloud platform that can host your existing applications and streamline new application development. Azure can even enhance on-premises applications. Azure integrates the cloud services that you need to develop, test, deploy, and manage your applications, all while taking advantage of the efficiencies of cloud computing.

By hosting your applications in Azure, you can start small and easily scale your application as your customer demand grows. Azure also offers the reliability that's needed for high-availability applications, even including failover between different regions.

This section describes the Azure terminology specific to onboarding an Azure application in Britive. This includes types of Azure accounts:

Azure Account

To create or work with an Azure subscription, you must have an Azure account. An Azure account is simply an identity in Azure AD or in a directory, such as a work or a school organization, that Azure AD trusts. If you don't belong to such an organization, you can always create a subscription by using your Microsoft Account, which is trusted by Azure AD.

Azure Subscription

A subscription is a logical grouping of Azure services that are linked to an Azure account. A single Azure account can contain multiple subscriptions. Billing for Azure services is done on a per-subscription basis. For a list of the available subscription offers by type, see Microsoft Azure Offer Details.

Every Azure subscription has a trust relationship with an Azure AD instance. This means that it trusts that directory to authenticate users, services, and devices. Multiple subscriptions can trust the same directory, but a subscription trusts only one directory.

Users and Groups in Azure

As well as defining individual Azure account identities, also called users, you can define groups in Azure AD. Creating user groups is a good way to manage access to resources in a subscription by using role-based access control (RBAC). To learn how to create groups, see Create a group in Azure Active Directory preview.

Resource and Resource groups

When you provision new Azure services, you do so in a given subscription. Individual Azure services, which are also called resources, are created in the context of a resource group. Resource groups make it easier to deploy and manage your application's resources. A resource group should contain all the resources for your application that you want to work with as a unit. You can move resources between resource groups and even to different subscriptions.