Purchasing Azure Services for Production Use

[Jan. 8, 2019 note: A more recent version of this report, updated to reflect licensing changes, can be found at www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/licensing/secured/2019/01/purchasing-azure-services-production-use.]

Subscriptions to Azure, Microsoft’s hosted application and storage services offering, can be purchased several ways. While some services with Azure branding, such as Azure Active Directory, are used for IT infrastructure, the Azure brand (and this report) focuses on Azure IaaS and PaaS public cloud services for application development and delivery. Purchasing Azure subscriptions in conjunction with an organization’s volume licensing agreements can provide some benefits. However, it is also likely to result in longer-term financial obligations, particularly if the organization finds that it overestimated the volume of Azure services that would be consumed during the life of the agreement.

Understanding Azure Subscriptions

An Azure tenancy, often referred to by Microsoft as an Azure account, contains an organization’s deployment of Azure resources and uses an instance of Azure Active Directory (AAD) for authentication into the Azure account.