Why do Azure Resource Groups have an Azure Region association?

All resources within Microsoft Azure are created within an Azure Resource Group. While every resource has an Azure Region (aka location) specified as to where the resource will be hosted, so do Azure Resource Groups. This may be confusing at first, since Azure Resource Groups are a “global” resource. This means they are just an organization container within Microsoft Azure to put other Azure resources within.

This is a question I’ve gotten a lot over the year as an Azure trainer. This article will explain the answer to that, as well as give you more information so you can better understand the functions and purpose of Azure Resource Groups.

What is an Azure Resource Group?

Azure Resource Groups are logical containers within your Microsoft Azure Subscription that provide the ability to organize related Azure resources together. This improves the ability to provision, manage, and maintain multiple Azure resources that are a part of the same workload in a unified manner. Essentially, a Resource Group acts as a logical boundary to group together resources that share a common lifecycle, such as an application, data warehouse, or enterprise service.

Resource Group are a fundamental concept at the core of Microsoft Azure resource management within an Azure Subscription. Some workloads may be a single database server and database; while others could be a grouping of many different Azure resources that are all used to build a more complex enterprise solution.

What are the Benefits and Purpose of Azure Resource Groups?

Resource Groups within Microsoft Azure are there to help with the organization and simplified management of Azure resources that are a part of the same workload. This sounds pretty straight forward, but there are actually several benefits and purposes to Azure resource management utilizing Resource Groups that goes a bit further than the simplified “part of the same workload” explanation.

Here’s a better list of the benefits and purpose of Azure Resource Groups:

Unified Management

Azure Resource Groups provide a consolidated view of related resources that are a part of the same workload. This enables easier management, monitoring, and governance over these related resources. When provisioning and managing related resources, it’s typical that an ARM Template, Azure Bicep template, or HashiCorp Terraform configuration will target the management of all the resources within a single Azure Resource Group and enterprise workload. This helps manage all those related Azure resources together in a unified manner, that also maintains clean organization away from other unrelated Azure resources and workloads.

Security Boundary

Azure Resource Groups provide a security boundary for the provisioning and management of Azure resources within an Azure Subscription. Role-based Access Control (RBAC) within Microsoft Azure is used to control the security around resource management by granting granular access and security policies. Sure, RBAC can be assigned to individual resources, but RBAC can also be assigned at the Resource Group. This allows granting access and managing security policies on an entire enterprise workload and all of it’s related Azure resources that are all organized within the same Azure Resource Group.

Resource Lifecycle Management

When provisioning Azure resources, there may be some resources that are provisioned, configured, or even secured separately. Each of these would mean those resources have different lifecycles. Azure Resource Groups can be used to easily separate Azure resources that may be a part of the same workload, but require different lifecycle management and security controls. Using Azure Resource Groups for lifecycle management of Azure resources is a great way to maintain better organization and security controls over those resources.

For example, the Azure SQL Database may need to be managed by the Data Engineering team, the Azure Web App managed by the Development team, and you may not want the Developers to have access to the database directly. This would warrant two separate Azure Resource Groups to be used to split apart those resources and be able to apply RBAC security roles for those teams specifically to the Azure Resource Group with the resources they need to manage.

Resource Tagging and Cost Management

Azure Resource Groups, along with all other Azure resources, support Tagging. Azure resource Tags enable a set of key/value pair to be added as metadata to the resources and Resource Groups within an Azure Subscription. This is another feature that helps to better organize Azure resources, and they are displayed on the resources within the Azure Portal, as wall as have support for querying / filtering based on applied tags using the Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, ARM REST APIs to help with resource management.

Azure Tags are a great way to specific the name of the workload, environment, cost center responsible for the workload, or any other metadata that helps with better Azure resource organization. Tags can be used for cost tracking, budgeting, and reporting purposes. Using Tags this way will help track the Azure spend of specific workloads and the ability to bill specific departments / cost centers within the organization (or even specific clients) for the cost of those Azure resources.

Why are Azure Resource Groups associated with a specific region?

While Azure Resource Groups are a “global” type of resource within Azure, they will have an Azure Region (aka location) associate with them. Since Resource Groups can contain Azure resources that are provisioned in any Azure Region, you may be asking, “Why are Azure Resource Groups associated with a specific region?”

To answer this, let’s take a look at the ways an Azure Resource Groups region / location is used:

Azure Resource Group Metadata Location

Setting the Azure Region for a Resource Group specifies the Azure Region under the covers within Microsoft Azure where the metadata for that Resource Group resource itself is stored within Azure. Yet, Azure Resource Groups are “global” resources, but there will be a primary Azure Region for the source of truth of that Resource Groups metadata under the covers within the Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM) that manages everything.

For compliance reasons, setting the correct Azure Region on the Azure Resource Group may be required in order to ensure that all data pertaining to an enterprise workload is stored in a particular region or within a specific geo-political boundary.

State Consistency and Availability

With the metadata for an Azure Resource Group being stored in the Azure Region associated with the Resource Group, all control plan operations for the Resource Group and the Azure Resources within the group will be routed through the Azure Resource Manager backend for that specific region.

This means that if the Azure Region for the Azure Resource Group is temporarily available, then any requests to update Azure resources within that Resource Group may be unavailable. This is because the name and tags of the Azure Resource Group isn’t the only metadata for the Resource Group stored in the Resource Groups region, the metadata for the Azure Resources within the Azure Resource Group is also stored in that region.

As a result, it’s important that if you provision all your Azure resources within a Resource Group in a single Azure Region, that the Azure Resource Group has that same Azure Region specified.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Deployment

When writing IaC configurations using Azure Bicep, ARM Templates, HashiCorp Terraform, or any other IaC tool, it’s common to have the template base the Azure Region for provisioning the Azure resources off of the region specified on the Azure Resource Group the resources are being organized within.

This is actually the best practice when configuring IaC deployments of Azure resources. Once the Azure Region on the Azure Resource Group is configured, then all the Azure resources (or entire workload) managed by the IaC template will be provisioned within the Azure Resource Groups specified region.

Conclusion

As you can see, Azure Resource Group are both a container for organization, management, and security of the Azure resources that are all a part of the same enterprise workload and/or lifecycle. However, the metadata storage for the Azure Resource Group and it’s resources are stored within the specified Azure Region; which could be important for compliance purposes, as well as improved availability during a potential Azure Region outage affecting management of the Resource Group and it’s resources.

I hope this article clarifies things and answered your questions about why Azure Resource Groups have their own configuration for the Azure Region (aka location) they are associated with.

Original Article Source: Why do Azure Resource Groups have an Azure Region association? written by Chris Pietschmann (If you're reading this somewhere other than Build5Nines.com, it was republished without permission.)