Azure Resource groups: Organizing and maintaining your Microsoft Azure services

One of the things that I see on the current Azure portal is that it’s difficult to organize services that you are using. Generally, what we do is use nomenclatures when naming services, so that it is easier to know which ones are working together. However, this doesn’t solve the problem because sometimes it is necessary to remove a set of related resources and is quite tedious to go tab by tab eliminating those that are no longer needed.

Well, all this is Azure Resource groups: a way to organize services that are related in order to improve compression and maintenance of your subscription.

Where do I find my Azure Resource groups?

On the new Microsoft Azure portal, there is a section called Browse where you can find different services that are available today. Also you can see a section named Resource groups which I have pinned it on my Dashboard.

¿Dónde encontrar los Azure Resource group?
Where do I find my Azure Resource Groups?

If you work with the old portal, you may have noticed that you have created several resource groups. This is because we need consistency between portals  in the future. For this post I’ve created two groups of resources: Production and Staging, pretending that I’m organizing my services by environments, although other criteria could be used (by department, teams, applications, etc.).

Resource groups old and new portal
Resources created from the new portal and generated from the current portal

See your related resources

If you access to Production or Staging, you can see which services are associated with it in the Summary section.

Servicios asociados a Production
Resources in the Production resource group

Add new resources

The way to associate, or create new Azure Resource groups, is creating a new resource (which is not possible on the old portal and It generated automatically).

New storage account for Production Resource group
Adding new resource to Production

If you already have a resource group you can add new resources from it.

Add new resource from a resource group
Add new resource from a resource group

 Delete a resource group

Finally, something that is really useful is the way of removing several associated resources. Thanks to this setup, you just need to delete the resource group and all components will be removed, without having to do it one by one as in the current portal.

Another option that makes this feature really necessary is the ability to associate groups or users, in order to allow or restrict access to the group’s services.

Cheers!