Azure Resource Groups Deploy, Organize, Secure Apps

Azure’s upcoming Resource Groups feature organizes Azure resources such as virtual machines and network and storage elements that comprise an application or set of related functionality. Resource Groups ease deployment, help with management and billing, and simplify the configuration of security policies. However, organizations must implement new administrative procedures and work with a new set of template files to take advantage of the feature.

Logical Resource Organization Enabled

Resource Groups were introduced in the Azure Preview Portal in Apr. 2014 to organize resources within meaningful collections, such as by application, rather than in a single flat list within an Azure subscription. (The Azure Preview Portal, in public preview with no announced general availability date, is the next major revision of the Web-based Azure management portal.)

Many types of compute, network, and storage resources, such as virtual machines and networks, SQL-based and nonrelational databases, Web sites, and caches, may be provisioned to build an application on Azure. Azure previously has not offered a way to organize provisioned resources that are part of a logical unit, such as an application. Customers can view resources by type, but they have to employ a naming scheme to help identify the purpose of each resource. Growing lists of resources can become unwieldy as customer deployments on Azure expand.