Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud platform and growing continuously. This post will cover the resource group concept, which is integral part of any resource in Azure IaaS. Microsoft Azure platform has been spread across multiple geographical locations and once you create any resource in MS Azure IaaS, basically it belongs to a particular region that you had selected at the time of deployment.

In layman’s language, resource group is nothing but it is just like a logical container that makes your life easier after deployment of multiple resources. Let’s take an example of virtual machine. When you create a virtual machine, you can observe that it is a combination of multiple resources such as compute, storage, networking etc. In case of traditional datacenter you can touch and feel these items but in case of virtual machine you can presume that your cpu cores and memory is your compute, virtual hard disks are your storage and virtual networks are your networking components. As you know each resource in a virtual machine gives complement to another resource and for us it is advisable to keep all of them in a single pool for better interaction. Once you create these resources such as storage account or virtual network, you specify a resource group and location. If you have an existing resource group then the location will be selected by default as per the resource group.

Now, let’s discuss the same thing in technical language. A resource groups allows you to create and manage multiple resources in a single container so that you can manage them easily by grouping them together. A resource group facilitates that all the resources in a resource group belongs to same region, where the resource group was located but you can still change the resource location if you want. This feature make sure that multiple resources are located nearby to each other to provide better performance. With the help of resource group, you can easily deploy, update, and delete multiple resources within the resource group by a single or few clicks. Resource group provides you an ability to secure your resources by configuring user and administrator roles through “Access control (IAM)”. There are many other cool features such as policies, monitoring etc. that you can explore by playing with it.

Therefore now let’s see how to create a resource group.

Go to the https://portal.azure.com and click on “Resource groups”.

Click on “Add” to create a new resource group.

Fill the required information such as “Resource group name”, select “Subscription” and select “Resource group location”.

Once resource group has been created, you can see multiple options such as “Access control”, “Resource costs”, “Policies” etc.

To understand better, you can take an example of cluster/pool. Multiple components such as VMs, storage pools and virtual networks make a single cluster/pool and if you need to manage these multiple components, it is better always to keep them in a single place called resource group so that you can have a single view from the application point of view such as cluster manger and from the baseline infrastructure point of view as well that is resource group. Now, you should start playing with it to learn more about each option given under resource group.