What Is Azure Resource Group?

What Is Azure Resource Group?

Modern cloud infrastructure demands sophisticated organizational strategies that enable businesses to manage their digital assets efficiently. The complexity of cloud environments, with their multitude of services, applications, and dependencies, requires a systematic approach to resource management. Without proper organization, cloud deployments can quickly become chaotic, leading to increased costs, security vulnerabilities, and operational inefficiencies that undermine the very benefits cloud computing promises to deliver.

At the heart of Microsoft Azure's organizational framework lies a fundamental concept that serves as the cornerstone of resource management: the resource group. This logical container provides a unified approach to managing and organizing related resources, offering administrators and developers a powerful tool for controlling their cloud infrastructure. Understanding this concept opens doors to more effective cloud governance, streamlined operations, and optimized cost management across your entire Azure environment.

Throughout this comprehensive exploration, you'll discover the architectural principles behind resource groups, their practical applications in real-world scenarios, and the strategic advantages they bring to cloud operations. You'll learn how to leverage resource groups for improved security, simplified billing, automated deployments, and enhanced team collaboration. Whether you're a cloud architect designing enterprise solutions or a developer deploying your first application, this knowledge will transform how you approach Azure infrastructure management.

Understanding the Fundamental Concept

A resource group in Microsoft Azure represents a logical container that holds related resources for an Azure solution. Think of it as a folder that groups together all the components that make up your application or service. Every resource you create in Azure—whether it's a virtual machine, database, storage account, or web application—must belong to exactly one resource group. This mandatory association ensures that every Azure resource has a clear organizational home and can be managed as part of a cohesive unit.

The fundamental design philosophy behind resource groups centers on the concept of lifecycle management. Resources that share the same lifecycle—meaning they're created, updated, and deleted together—should reside in the same resource group. For example, if you're building a web application that requires a web server, database, and storage account, all these components would typically live in the same resource group because they collectively constitute a single solution. When you no longer need the application, you can delete the entire resource group, and Azure will remove all contained resources simultaneously.

"Resource groups provide the essential organizational structure that transforms Azure from a collection of individual services into a cohesive platform for building complete solutions."

Resource groups are region-specific metadata containers, but they can contain resources from different Azure regions. The resource group itself stores metadata about the resources it contains, and this metadata must reside in a specific Azure region for compliance and data residency requirements. However, the actual resources within that group can be deployed to any Azure region globally. This flexibility allows you to organize resources logically while maintaining the freedom to deploy them geographically close to your users for optimal performance.

The Hierarchical Position in Azure Architecture

Resource groups occupy a specific position within Azure's organizational hierarchy. At the top level sits the Azure subscription, which represents a billing boundary and administrative scope. Within each subscription, you can create multiple resource groups to organize resources based on various criteria such as application, environment, department, or project. Below the resource group level are the individual resources themselves—the actual services and components you deploy and use.

This hierarchical structure enables sophisticated access control and policy enforcement. Permissions and policies applied at the subscription level cascade down to all resource groups and resources within that subscription. Similarly, permissions assigned at the resource group level apply to all resources within that group. This inheritance model simplifies security management while providing the flexibility to implement exceptions when necessary for specific resources or scenarios.

Core Characteristics and Capabilities

Resource groups possess several defining characteristics that shape how they function within the Azure ecosystem. Understanding these characteristics is essential for making informed decisions about how to structure your Azure environment and leverage resource groups effectively for your specific needs and organizational requirements.

Lifecycle Management and Dependency Handling

One of the most powerful aspects of resource groups is their role in lifecycle management. When you delete a resource group, Azure automatically deletes all resources contained within it. This cascading deletion simplifies cleanup operations and ensures you don't accidentally leave orphaned resources that continue accruing costs. However, this power requires careful consideration—deleting a resource group is an irreversible operation that permanently removes all contained resources and their data.

Azure handles resource dependencies intelligently during deletion operations. If Resource A depends on Resource B, Azure will attempt to delete them in the correct order to respect these dependencies. For example, if a virtual machine has attached disks, Azure will deallocate the virtual machine before removing the disks. This dependency-aware deletion prevents errors and ensures clean removal of complex resource configurations.

• 🔄 Single Membership Rule: Each resource can belong to only one resource group at a time, ensuring clear ownership and preventing ambiguous management scenarios
• 🔄 Resource Mobility: Resources can be moved between resource groups, allowing you to reorganize your Azure environment as your needs evolve
• 🔄 Cross-Group References: Resources in different resource groups can interact and reference each other, enabling flexible architectural designs
• 🔄 Independent Lifecycles: Resources within a group can be created and deleted independently unless you delete the entire group
• 🔄 Metadata Storage: The resource group stores metadata about its resources, including configuration, state, and relationship information

Access Control and Security Boundaries

Resource groups serve as natural security boundaries within your Azure environment. Azure's role-based access control (RBAC) system allows you to assign permissions at the resource group level, granting users or service principals specific rights to all resources within that group. This capability dramatically simplifies access management compared to assigning permissions to individual resources.

"Effective security in Azure begins with thoughtful resource group design that aligns with your organization's access control requirements and separation of duties principles."

For example, you might create separate resource groups for development, testing, and production environments. Developers could receive contributor access to the development resource group, allowing them to create and modify resources freely. Meanwhile, they might have only read access to the production resource group, ensuring they can view production configurations without making potentially disruptive changes. This separation creates clear security boundaries that align with operational workflows.

Strategic Organization Patterns

Choosing the right organizational strategy for resource groups significantly impacts your ability to manage, secure, and optimize your Azure environment. Different organizations and scenarios call for different approaches, and understanding these patterns helps you design a structure that aligns with your specific requirements and operational model.

Environment-Based Organization

The environment-based approach creates separate resource groups for each deployment stage in your application lifecycle. This pattern is particularly popular because it aligns naturally with software development practices and provides clear separation between different operational contexts. You might create resource groups named "myapp-dev", "myapp-test", "myapp-staging", and "myapp-prod" to represent each environment.

This organization strategy offers several advantages. It enables environment-specific access control, allowing developers full access to development resources while restricting production access to operations teams. It also simplifies cost tracking by environment, making it easy to see how much each stage of your application lifecycle costs. Additionally, this pattern supports independent scaling and configuration of each environment—your production environment might use premium storage and larger virtual machines, while development uses basic tiers to minimize costs.

Application or Workload-Based Organization

Organizing resource groups by application or workload creates dedicated containers for each distinct system or service your organization operates. If you run multiple applications—such as a customer portal, internal HR system, and data analytics platform—each would receive its own resource group containing all necessary components. This approach provides clear application boundaries and simplifies management when different teams own different applications.

"The best resource group organization strategy is one that reflects your organization's structure, operational workflows, and business requirements rather than following a one-size-fits-all template."

This pattern works exceptionally well when applications have distinct owners, lifecycles, and requirements. Each application team can manage their resources independently without interfering with other teams. Cost allocation becomes straightforward because all costs associated with a specific application roll up to a single resource group. However, this approach can become complex when applications share common infrastructure like networking components or shared databases.

Hybrid and Advanced Patterns

Many organizations adopt hybrid approaches that combine multiple organizational principles. For example, you might create resource groups that represent both application and environment: "customerportal-prod", "customerportal-dev", "hrsystem-prod", "hrsystem-dev". This naming convention provides clarity about both what the resources do and what stage of the lifecycle they represent.

Another sophisticated pattern involves creating resource groups based on resource lifecycle and management characteristics rather than purely functional boundaries. You might have one resource group for long-lived infrastructure components like virtual networks and another for frequently updated application components. This separation allows you to update application resources without affecting stable networking infrastructure, reducing risk and simplifying change management processes.

• 💡 Department-Based Organization: Create resource groups aligned with organizational departments, facilitating cost allocation and departmental autonomy in cloud resource management
• 💡 Project-Based Organization: Temporary resource groups for specific projects that can be completely deleted when projects conclude, ensuring clean resource lifecycle management
• 💡 Tier-Based Organization: Separate resource groups for different application tiers (presentation, business logic, data), enabling independent scaling and security policies for each tier
• 💡 Geographic Organization: Resource groups organized by deployment region, useful for global applications with region-specific compliance or data residency requirements
• 💡 Shared Services Pattern: Dedicated resource groups for shared infrastructure components used across multiple applications, such as networking, monitoring, or identity services

Practical Implementation and Best Practices

Successfully implementing resource groups requires more than understanding their theoretical capabilities. Practical considerations around naming, tagging, deployment, and ongoing management determine whether your resource group strategy delivers its promised benefits or creates additional complexity that hampers operational efficiency.

Naming Conventions and Standards

Establishing a clear naming convention for resource groups is fundamental to maintaining an organized Azure environment, especially as your cloud footprint grows. A well-designed naming convention should communicate essential information about the resource group's purpose, ownership, and context at a glance. Consider including elements such as organization name, application name, environment, region, and instance number in your naming scheme.

For example, a naming pattern like "orgname-appname-environment-region-instance" might produce names such as "contoso-customerportal-prod-eastus-01". This systematic approach ensures consistency across your organization and makes it easy for anyone to understand what a resource group contains without needing to inspect its resources. Consistency in naming also enables automation scripts to identify and operate on resource groups programmatically based on naming patterns.

"A robust naming convention is not just about organization—it's about enabling automation, supporting compliance requirements, and ensuring your Azure environment remains manageable as it scales."

Tagging Strategy for Enhanced Management

While naming conventions provide basic organization, tags offer a more flexible and powerful mechanism for categorizing and managing resource groups. Tags are key-value pairs that you attach to resource groups and resources, enabling you to add metadata that supports cost tracking, automation, compliance, and operational management without being constrained by naming limitations.

Common tagging strategies include cost center tags for financial allocation, environment tags for lifecycle management, owner tags for accountability, and compliance tags for regulatory requirements. For instance, you might tag resource groups with "CostCenter: Marketing", "Environment: Production", "Owner: john.doe@company.com", and "DataClassification: Confidential". These tags enable powerful filtering and reporting capabilities across your entire Azure environment.

Deployment and Infrastructure as Code

Modern cloud operations emphasize infrastructure as code (IaC) approaches that define resource groups and their contents in declarative templates rather than creating them manually through the portal. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, Bicep files, and Terraform configurations allow you to define your entire resource group structure and contents in version-controlled code, enabling repeatable, consistent deployments across multiple environments.

Using IaC for resource group management brings significant advantages. You can deploy identical configurations to development, testing, and production environments, ensuring consistency and reducing configuration drift. Version control provides a complete history of changes to your infrastructure, supporting audit requirements and enabling rollback if deployments cause issues. Automated deployments reduce human error and accelerate provisioning times from hours or days to minutes.

Cost Management and Optimization

Resource groups play a crucial role in understanding and controlling your Azure spending. The organizational structure they provide forms the foundation for effective cost management practices that help you optimize your cloud investment and prevent budget overruns that can undermine the financial benefits of cloud adoption.

Cost Visibility and Allocation

Azure's cost management tools provide resource group-level cost reporting, allowing you to see exactly how much each resource group costs over any time period. This visibility is essential for understanding where your cloud budget goes and identifying opportunities for optimization. You can view costs broken down by resource type within each group, revealing whether compute, storage, networking, or other services drive your spending.

This granular visibility supports accurate cost allocation across your organization. If you've organized resource groups by department, project, or application, you can directly attribute costs to the appropriate budget owner. This transparency encourages responsible resource usage because teams can see the financial impact of their deployment decisions. It also supports chargeback or showback models where IT departments bill internal customers for their cloud consumption.

"Effective cost management in Azure begins with thoughtful resource group organization that aligns with how your organization thinks about and allocates cloud spending."

Budget Controls and Alerts

Azure allows you to set budgets at the resource group level, creating spending limits with automated alerts when costs approach or exceed thresholds. For example, you might set a monthly budget of $5,000 for a production resource group and configure alerts at 80%, 100%, and 120% of that budget. These alerts notify stakeholders before overspending becomes significant, enabling proactive cost management.

Budget controls are particularly valuable for non-production environments where cost optimization should be aggressive. Development and testing resource groups might have strict budgets with alerts that trigger automated actions like shutting down virtual machines or scaling down services when spending approaches limits. This automation prevents runaway costs from forgotten resources while ensuring production environments receive adequate resources to maintain service quality.

Security and Compliance Considerations

Resource groups are integral to implementing robust security and compliance practices in Azure. Their role as organizational containers and permission boundaries makes them essential tools for protecting sensitive data, enforcing security policies, and demonstrating compliance with regulatory requirements that govern how organizations handle information.

Role-Based Access Control Implementation

Implementing least privilege access through resource groups means granting users only the permissions they need to perform their job functions and nothing more. Azure's RBAC system provides built-in roles like Owner, Contributor, and Reader, along with numerous service-specific roles that offer fine-grained control over what users can do with resources.

A typical implementation might assign the Contributor role to application developers for development resource groups, allowing them to create and manage resources. The same developers might receive only the Reader role for production resource groups, enabling them to view configurations for troubleshooting without the ability to make changes. Operations teams would receive Contributor or Owner roles for production environments, reflecting their responsibility for maintaining production systems.

Policy Enforcement and Governance

Azure Policy enables you to enforce organizational standards and compliance requirements at the resource group level. Policies can prevent users from creating non-compliant resources, automatically apply required configurations, or audit existing resources for compliance violations. This enforcement ensures that all resources within a group meet your organization's standards regardless of who creates them.

Common policy implementations include enforcing specific naming conventions, requiring certain tags on all resources, restricting which Azure regions can be used, limiting which resource types can be deployed, or requiring encryption for storage accounts. These policies transform resource groups from simple organizational containers into active governance tools that automatically enforce your organization's cloud standards.

• 🔒 Resource Locks: Apply read-only or delete locks to resource groups to prevent accidental modifications or deletions of critical infrastructure
• 🔒 Network Security: Use resource groups to organize network security groups and firewall rules that control traffic flow between application tiers
• 🔒 Encryption Requirements: Enforce encryption policies at the resource group level to ensure all storage and database resources use encryption at rest
• 🔒 Audit Logging: Configure diagnostic settings at resource group level to centralize logs for security monitoring and compliance reporting
• 🔒 Privileged Access Management: Implement just-in-time access for resource groups containing sensitive resources, granting elevated permissions only when needed

Advanced Scenarios and Integration

Beyond basic organizational and security functions, resource groups enable sophisticated scenarios that leverage Azure's platform capabilities for automation, disaster recovery, and complex architectural patterns. Understanding these advanced applications helps you extract maximum value from your Azure investment.

Automation and DevOps Integration

Resource groups serve as natural deployment targets for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and other automation tools can deploy entire applications to resource groups as atomic operations. If deployment fails, the automation can roll back changes or delete the resource group entirely, ensuring clean failure handling.

This integration enables powerful deployment patterns like blue-green deployments where you deploy a new version of your application to a separate resource group, test it thoroughly, then switch traffic from the old resource group to the new one. If issues arise, you can instantly switch back to the previous version by redirecting traffic to the original resource group. Once you're confident in the new version, you can delete the old resource group to clean up resources.

"Resource groups transform from simple organizational tools into powerful enablers of modern DevOps practices when integrated with automation and deployment pipelines."

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Resource groups play an important role in disaster recovery planning. Azure Site Recovery can replicate entire resource groups to secondary regions, enabling rapid failover if your primary region experiences an outage. This capability ensures business continuity by maintaining synchronized copies of your infrastructure and data in geographically separated locations.

Backup strategies often align with resource group organization. You might configure Azure Backup to protect all virtual machines and databases within production resource groups with aggressive backup schedules and long retention periods, while development resource groups receive minimal backup protection or none at all. This alignment ensures critical resources receive appropriate protection without wasting backup storage on disposable development resources.

Multi-Region and Global Deployments

Organizations with global presence often deploy applications across multiple Azure regions for performance, redundancy, and data residency compliance. While resource groups themselves exist in a single region, you can create parallel resource group structures across regions—for example, "myapp-prod-eastus" and "myapp-prod-westeurope"—that contain region-specific deployments of the same application.

This multi-region pattern enables sophisticated traffic management strategies using Azure Traffic Manager or Front Door to route users to the nearest or best-performing region. If one region experiences issues, traffic automatically fails over to healthy regions. Each regional resource group can be managed independently while maintaining consistent configuration through infrastructure as code templates that deploy identical configurations to each location.

Common Challenges and Solutions

Despite their conceptual simplicity, organizations frequently encounter challenges when implementing resource group strategies at scale. Understanding these common pitfalls and their solutions helps you avoid mistakes that can complicate management and reduce the effectiveness of your organizational approach.

Over-Segmentation and Management Complexity

One common mistake is creating too many resource groups, leading to excessive fragmentation that makes management more difficult rather than easier. If every minor component receives its own resource group, you end up with hundreds or thousands of groups that become impossible to manage effectively. The overhead of maintaining separate RBAC assignments, policies, and monitoring for each group outweighs the organizational benefits.

The solution involves finding the right balance between organization and simplicity. Group resources that genuinely share lifecycles and management characteristics while avoiding unnecessary subdivision. A good rule of thumb is that if resources are always deployed, updated, and deleted together, they should probably share a resource group. If they have independent lifecycles or different access control requirements, separation makes sense.

Inadequate Planning for Growth

Organizations sometimes implement resource group structures that work well initially but don't scale as their Azure usage grows. An organizational pattern that makes sense for three applications and one environment becomes unwieldy when you have thirty applications and five environments. Planning for scale from the beginning prevents painful reorganization efforts later.

"The best time to establish scalable resource group conventions is before you need them—reorganizing a large Azure environment is significantly more difficult than designing a good structure from the start."

Addressing this challenge requires thinking ahead about how your Azure usage might evolve. Will you add more applications? Deploy to additional regions? Create more environments? Your resource group naming and organizational strategy should accommodate these possibilities without requiring fundamental restructuring. Regular reviews of your resource group structure help identify when adjustments are needed before problems become severe.

Shared Resources and Cross-Group Dependencies

Many organizations struggle with shared infrastructure that multiple applications use, such as virtual networks, shared storage, or common databases. Placing shared resources in one application's resource group creates confusing ownership, while creating separate shared resource groups introduces dependencies that complicate lifecycle management.

The solution often involves creating dedicated resource groups for shared services that have their own lifecycle independent of any specific application. A "shared-networking" resource group might contain virtual networks and VPN gateways used across applications. A "shared-monitoring" resource group might hold Log Analytics workspaces and Application Insights instances. This separation clarifies ownership and lifecycle while acknowledging that some infrastructure serves multiple purposes.

Monitoring and Operational Management

Effective ongoing management of resource groups requires visibility into their state, performance, and health. Azure provides numerous tools for monitoring and managing resource groups that help you maintain operational excellence and quickly identify and resolve issues that could impact your applications and services.

Activity Logs and Audit Trails

Azure automatically maintains activity logs for all operations performed on resource groups and their contained resources. These logs capture who performed what action, when it occurred, and whether it succeeded or failed. This audit trail is invaluable for security investigations, compliance reporting, and troubleshooting operational issues.

You can query activity logs to answer questions like "Who deleted this resource?" or "What changes were made to this resource group yesterday?" The logs retain data for 90 days by default, but you can export them to storage accounts or Log Analytics workspaces for longer retention periods. This extended retention supports compliance requirements that mandate multi-year audit trails for certain industries and data types.

Resource Health and Diagnostics

Azure provides resource health information that indicates whether resources within a group are functioning correctly or experiencing issues. This health data aggregates to the resource group level, giving you a quick overview of whether everything in a group is healthy or if problems require attention. Health checks detect issues like platform problems, maintenance events, or configuration errors that could impact availability.

Diagnostic settings allow you to configure logging and metrics collection for resources within a group. You can apply diagnostic settings at the resource group level to ensure all resources send logs and metrics to centralized monitoring solutions like Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, or external SIEM systems. This centralization simplifies monitoring by ensuring consistent data collection across all resources without requiring individual configuration.

Migration and Reorganization Strategies

As your Azure environment evolves, you may need to reorganize resource groups to better align with changing business needs, improved understanding of best practices, or organizational restructuring. Azure provides capabilities for moving resources between groups, but these operations require careful planning and execution to avoid service disruptions.

Moving Resources Between Groups

Azure supports moving most resource types between resource groups within the same subscription or even across subscriptions. This capability allows you to reorganize your environment without recreating resources from scratch. However, not all resource types support movement, and some have specific requirements or limitations that must be considered before attempting a move.

Before moving resources, verify that the resource types support movement and understand any prerequisites. Some resources require downtime during the move, while others can be moved with minimal or no service interruption. Dependencies between resources must be carefully managed—if Resource A depends on Resource B, you typically need to move both together or ensure the dependency can span resource groups after the move.

Planning Major Reorganizations

Large-scale reorganizations involving many resource groups and resources require careful planning and execution. Start by documenting your current state and desired end state, identifying all resources that need to move and their dependencies. Create a detailed migration plan that sequences moves to respect dependencies and minimizes risk to production services.

Consider performing reorganizations during maintenance windows to minimize impact on users. Test the reorganization process in non-production environments first to identify potential issues and refine your procedures. Have rollback plans ready in case moves cause unexpected problems. Communication with stakeholders is critical—users, developers, and operations teams need to know about planned changes and any potential service impacts.

Integration with Azure Services

Resource groups integrate deeply with numerous Azure services, extending their utility beyond simple organization into active participants in service delivery, security, and operations. Understanding these integrations helps you leverage the full power of the Azure platform.

Azure Policy and Governance

Azure Policy uses resource groups as assignment scopes for policy definitions that enforce organizational standards. You can assign policies at the subscription level to affect all resource groups, or target specific resource groups for specialized policies. This flexibility enables both broad governance across your entire Azure environment and targeted compliance for specific workloads or applications.

Policy initiatives—collections of related policy definitions—can enforce comprehensive compliance frameworks like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or ISO 27001 at the resource group level. These initiatives ensure that all resources within a group meet the requirements of specific regulatory frameworks, automatically auditing compliance and preventing deployment of non-compliant resources. This automation reduces the burden of compliance management while improving your security posture.

Azure Monitor and Application Insights

Azure Monitor provides resource group-scoped monitoring capabilities that aggregate metrics, logs, and alerts across all resources within a group. You can create dashboards that display the health and performance of an entire application by focusing on a single resource group. Alert rules can monitor conditions across multiple resources in a group, triggering notifications when aggregate metrics exceed thresholds.

Application Insights, Azure's application performance monitoring service, often aligns with resource groups to provide application-centric observability. All components of an application—web apps, functions, databases—send telemetry to a shared Application Insights instance within the resource group. This centralization provides end-to-end visibility into application behavior, performance, and user experience without needing to correlate data across multiple monitoring solutions.

Azure Backup and Site Recovery

Protection services like Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery can be configured at the resource group level, simplifying the protection of entire applications. You can create backup policies that automatically protect all supported resources within a group, ensuring comprehensive data protection without requiring individual resource configuration. Similarly, disaster recovery plans can replicate entire resource groups to secondary regions for business continuity.

This group-level protection approach ensures that new resources added to a protected resource group automatically receive appropriate backup or disaster recovery coverage. This automation prevents gaps in protection that could occur if administrators forget to configure protection for newly deployed resources. It also ensures consistent protection policies across all components of an application, reducing complexity and improving reliability.

Can resources in different Azure regions belong to the same resource group?

Yes, resources can be located in any Azure region regardless of the resource group's location. The resource group itself stores metadata in a specific region, but the actual resources it contains can be deployed globally across any Azure region. This flexibility allows you to organize resources logically while deploying them geographically close to users for optimal performance.

What happens to resources when I delete a resource group?

Deleting a resource group permanently deletes all resources contained within it. This is an irreversible operation that removes all data, configurations, and resources. Azure handles dependencies intelligently during deletion, removing resources in the correct order to respect interdependencies. Always verify the contents of a resource group before deleting it to avoid accidental data loss.

How many resource groups can I create in an Azure subscription?

Azure subscriptions support up to 980 resource groups per subscription. This limit is quite generous and sufficient for most organizations. If you approach this limit, it typically indicates over-segmentation that may be making management more complex than necessary. Consider consolidating resources into fewer groups based on shared lifecycles and management characteristics.

Can I move resources between resource groups without downtime?

Most Azure resources can be moved between resource groups with minimal or no downtime, but this depends on the specific resource type. Some resources like virtual machines may experience brief interruptions during the move, while others like storage accounts typically move without service disruption. Always check the documentation for specific resource types and test moves in non-production environments before moving production resources.

How do resource group permissions interact with subscription-level permissions?

Azure uses an additive permission model where permissions assigned at higher levels (subscription) are inherited by lower levels (resource groups and resources). If a user has Contributor access at the subscription level, they automatically have Contributor access to all resource groups and resources within that subscription. You cannot use resource group permissions to remove access granted at the subscription level—you can only add additional permissions.

Should I create separate resource groups for each environment or each application?

The answer depends on your organization's structure and operational needs. Many organizations use a hybrid approach with resource groups that represent both application and environment, such as "app1-prod" and "app1-dev". This provides clear separation for both access control and cost tracking. Consider factors like team structure, access control requirements, cost allocation needs, and deployment patterns when deciding on your organizational strategy.

Can resources in one resource group communicate with resources in another?

Yes, resources in different resource groups can communicate and reference each other without restrictions. Resource groups are organizational containers, not network or security boundaries. A web application in one resource group can connect to a database in another resource group. However, for management simplicity, resources that work together closely should typically reside in the same resource group unless there are specific reasons for separation.

How do I track costs for resources across multiple resource groups?

Azure Cost Management provides filtering and grouping capabilities that allow you to aggregate costs across multiple resource groups. You can use tags to categorize resources across different groups and then filter cost reports by those tags. For example, tagging all production resources with "Environment: Production" regardless of which resource group they're in allows you to see total production costs across your entire Azure environment.