Disclaimer: The following text is an attempt to explain, to someone who is not familiar with Azure, a quite complicated subject, by using universally known terms, as a parallelism. Obviously, many things are inaccurate, but I hope that it somehow helps someone understand what Azure is.

I often find myself trying to explain various subjects related to Azure, cloud architecture, etc. The most common question is the following:

What are the management groups, the subscriptions, the resource groups, etc?

The simple answer is to show this, but it almost creates more questions than understandings.

To answer such questions, I always try to find a parallelism that works, and I think that this one covers most bases. I mean, if you let your thoughts run wild for a moment, Azure is somewhat like a super mega huge chain restaurant that sells most kinds of food and drinks. Before you laugh, let me explain—it makes sense, I promise!

Assumptions

1. Traditional computing = Cooking food and eating at home. Your home is your server, and the food can be either bought (software product) or made at home (cooking pasta = creating an application).
2. Cloud computing = Eating at a restaurant.

Azure as a Restaurant

Now let’s jump into Azure, a freaking huge restaurant, and it looks like this:

So how is Azure similar to a restaurant?

The floors, tables, and chairs are Azure’s backbone. They are endless; we know they exist but not much more than that. We don’t really think about them so much—we only need one table after all. They have restaurants (backbones) pretty much in the whole world (Azure regions). Now let’s see what happens in every restaurant:

1. A table is an Azure tenant. Azure’s tables are endless in size, and you can put incredible amounts of food on them. You are not allowed to put food on the table, and you pay absolutely nothing for getting a table!
2. On the table, you have a tablecloth, which is the root management group. Most visitors will be happy with just one, but it’s possible to use smaller tablecloths (management groups) to keep things tidy. You are not allowed to put food on the tablecloth, and you still pay nothing!
3. On the tablecloth, you have placemats, which are subscriptions. You can have more than one (and it’s recommended to use more than one for testing). You still cannot put food on the placemats, and you pay absolutely nothing yet.

Finally, the dishes on the placemats (subscriptions) are resource groups. Just like dishes are used to put food on them, Azure resource groups are used to put Azure resources inside them. While you can mix your main course and dessert on the same dish, it’s recommended to keep related resources in the same resource group.

Why Choose This Restaurant Over Cooking at Home?

1. Pay-as-you-go: Use only what you need without buying expensive tools.
2. Scalability: Start small and scale up or out as needed.
3. Flexibility: No need to buy licenses for one-time use; Azure provides managed services.
4. Maintenance-free: Azure handles hardware security and updates for you.

What Does This Restaurant Sell?

The menu (Azure Marketplace) offers:

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Lease hardware like virtual machines, networks, and storage.
2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Get specialized tools for specific tasks.
3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Ready-to-use applications.

Bringing Your Own Food

Azure allows you to bring your own applications or use their SaaS products.

How Is the Food Served?

You can manually deploy your food or upload your recipe (source code) to a cookbook (repository). Use a pipeline to build and deploy your application. Azure supports Infrastructure-as-Code tools like ARM templates, Bicep files, and Terraform to describe your entire setup.

Enjoy your meal at the Azure restaurant!