Azure Policies: Examples and Effects

The Azure Policy community repo contains hundreds of policies shared by Microsoft and the community. Azure Policy is a free service that is critical for deployment governance because it helps organizations set and maintain standards for how Azure services are used within an Azure tenancy.

Examples of policies currently in the repo are shown in this chart, and they assist with the following governance:

The use of Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and SQL Server on new and existing resources. Organizations can use this to ensure they are taking advantage of the Benefit to cut costs. Other policies in the repo audit and enforce that the Hybrid Benefit is not used on resources, which helps organizations prevent deployments from having discounts that are not covered by owned licenses.

The use of particular VM images. This policy enforces that specific VM images approved by an organization are used on all VMs for consistency and better control over the OSs and applications used.