Microsoft says, "In Azure Active Directory a tenant is an instance of Azure Active Directory that an organization receives when it signs up for a cloud application like Microsoft 365."
Could anyone explain what it means for a tenant to be an instance of the Azure Active Directory?
I know that an instance is basically a virtual machine. However, I'm failing to see how that definition applies in this particular context.
In your context, Instance of Azure Active Directory means Azure tenant.
I agree with #Peter Bons, Azure tenant is a dedicated and trusted instance of Azure AD.
Tenant refers to a single instance of Azure Active Directory.
Please note that tenant will be automatically created when your organization signs up for a Microsoft cloud service subscription.
To make it simple, you can consider it as parent group that includes users and groups along with the access control to application and resources.
A tenant is associated with a single identity and can have one or several subscriptions.
Based on your requirement, you can have single tenant or multitenant.
Every tenant is linked to a single Azure AD instance, which is shared with all tenant's subscriptions.
Azure AD Tenants are globally unique and have scopes with a domain name ending with ‘onmicrosoft.com’ and has a Tenant ID in the form of UUID/GUID.
For more in detail, please refer below links:
Understanding Tenants, Subscriptions, Regions and Geographies in Azure – siliconvalve
What is Azure Active Directory Tenant and How to create (azurelib.com)
I am struggling to distinguish how an Azure Subscription and an Azure tenant are different? I have tried figuring it out using examples but each time I come to the conclusion that they are the same thing in a way? If a tenant is a dedicated instance of the Azure AD service that an organization receives and owns when it signs up for a Microsoft cloud service, then is that not what a subscription is too?
Basic understanding:
a tenant is associated with a single identity (person, company, or organization) and can own one or several subscriptions
a subscription is linked to a payment setup and each subscription will result in a separate bill
in every subscription, you can add virtual resources (VM, storage, network, ...)
Additionally:
Every tenant is linked to a single Azure AD instance, which is shared with all tenant's subscriptions
Resources from one subscription are isolated from resources in other subscriptions
An owner of a tenant can decide to have multiple subscriptions:
when Subscriptions limits are reached
to use different payment methods
to isolate resources between different departments, projects, regional offices, and so on.
Example 1:
Contoso decides to have a tenant with 2 subscriptions:
one subscription for the Prod department with Credit Card A
one subscription for the Dev department with Credit Card B
(but could also be the same Credit Card as the one of another subscription)
In this example, the two departments share the same Azure AD database.
However, resources are isolated between departments, and budgets can be separated too.
Example 2:
A holding company decides to have 2 tenants:
one tenant for subsidiary Contoso with one subscription for Dev and Prod
one tenant for subsidiary Fabrikam with one subscription for Dev and another subscription for Prod
In this example, both companies have a different Azure AD database.
Example 3:
You have a tenant for your personal training.
In this tenant, you can have:
one free Azure subscription (linked to a credit card but not charged, and can be converted to a Pay-As-You-Go subscription after the free trial)
one or several Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions (linked to different credit cards)
one or several Azure Pass Sponsorship subscriptions, not linked to any credit card because these subscriptions are obtained during Microsoft trainings
one Visual Studio subscription (linked to a credit card) and with different quotas (of free resources) than the free subscription
Despite all those subscriptions have isolated resources (per subscription), and some are free while you have to pay for others, all subscriptions share the same Azure AD database.
Azure tenant is a directory. Azure subscription is an object that represents a "folder" that you can put resources in. Subscriptions are tied to tenants. so 1 tenant can have many subscriptions, but not vice versa.
Link:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits
It helps to take a scenario:
Let's say you logged into portal.azure.com for the first time and created a free tier account.
When you login to Azure, you have a single tenant ID associated with your account which will not change unless you ask Microsoft to delete your account(this is not your Azure domain user, this is your Microsoft subscription account - eg. bob#gmail.com).
You will only have 1 subscription unless you've purchased or manage other subscriptions (by using the 'transfer billing ownership' function), then they will all be listed under subscriptions.
You will have FULL access to all "resources" associated with your tenant ID. These resources can be part of your own Azure 'directory' or from another domain that someone has given you access to.
You can create up to 20 directories, and you can belong to up to 500 directories.
When you own the subscription (eg. a free account) you'll have full rights up to the 'root' of the subscription - eg. if you click on your name in the top right corner and select "... > your permissions" you see something like:
Your account 'YOURACCOUNT#gmail.com' has been assigned the role 'User Access Administrator' (type BuiltInRole) and has access to scope /.
Your resources have Role Based Access controls that you, the subscription owner, can assign to other users in your Azure Active Directory (or other trusted directories).
By default, for a new subscription, the Account Administrator is assigned the "Service Administrator" privilege. This is 'above' the RBAC roles - there can only be one service administrator per subscription. In RBAC terms this is an 'owner'.
More points:
A single tenant can have multiple AD directories, but a single directory can only have 1 tenant.
*It is recommended to maintain only a single tenant and manage all of your AD domains from that single tenant, otherwise the user experience between domains will not be a seamless.
*A tenant is directly associated with an AD resource - if you mouse over your username in the top right corner you'll see the AD domain you're connected to and a long alphanumeric string - that's the same string in AD > properties.
*If you switch to another directory (assuming you have one) your subscription name (bob#gmail.com) doesn't change, but the tenant ID will be different.
References:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/rbac-and-directory-admin-roles
https://marckean.com/2016/06/01/azure-vs-azure-ad-accounts-tenants-subscriptions/
https://blogit.create.pt/miguelisidoro/2019/01/07/pros-and-cons-of-single-tenant-vs-multiple-tenants-in-office-365/
This MS doc has explained everything very nicely - Subscriptions, licenses, accounts, and tenants for Microsoft's cloud offerings
Quoting from the Summary of the hierarchy section in the documentation:
Here is a quick recap:
An organization can have multiple subscriptions
A subscription can have multiple licenses
Licenses can be assigned to individual user accounts
User accounts are stored in an Azure AD tenant
Later in the same section it says:
Multiple Microsoft cloud offering subscriptions can use the same Azure
AD tenant that acts as a common identity provider. A central Azure AD
tenant that contains the synchronized accounts of your on-premises AD
DS provides cloud-based Identity as a Service (IDaaS) for your
organization.
Let us try to understand all this with the help of a real-life example. Let's assume that I'm the owner of a company named FooBar which manufactures software products. Now here is what I'll do to setup Azure infrastructure for my company:
I'll crete an Azure account using my email id.
Then for managing the employees of the company, I created below mentioned Azure Active Directories (AAD aka tenant) in my Azure account:
PermanentAad
AdhocAad
User account of all full-time employees (FTEs) will be added into PermanentAad AAD and all temporary or contractual employees will be added into AdhocAad AAD.
Similarly, I would like to manage the billing of adhoc employees and FTEs separately. So I creates two subscriptions namely PermanenetSub and AdhocSub. I'll setup a trust relationship between PermanentAad and PermanentSub. Similarly for AdhocAad and AdhocSub. So when any FTE creates an Azure resource e.g. a virtual machine(VM) then the cost of that VM will get added to total bill in PermanentSub subscription.
Now comes the licensing part. Licenses empower a user to do things in Azure e.g. creating resources, VMs etc. I can give Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 license to an FTE so that he can create VMs for testing any stuff.
To summarize:
If you want to work in Azure you need an Azure account. To create an Azure account you need an active email id.
If you want to add people/employees or machines/devices who would be part of your IT infrastructure you need a tenant/AAD. You get one tenant/AAD by default when you create an Azure account. You can create more if you require for any kind of logical separation. AAD service is a global service spanning across all locations in Azure which manages all of our AAD instances. AAD is also known as Azure Active Directory, AAD, an Azure AD instance, an AAD Instance, an Azure AD Tenant, an AAD tenant, simply tenant or an organization, etc. They all mean the same. Therefore:
Organization == Tenant == Azure Active Directory
If you require logical separation of billing for users of your Azure account then you need multiple subscriptions. You get one subscription by default when you create a new Azure account. Subscription can be of four types as per below list:
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Enterprise agreement
Cloud Solution Provider
If you want to enable the users to do things then you issue license(s) e.g. license to be able to create VM or Azure app service. Also remember that license and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) are not same although both enable you to do things in Azure portal. But they've different nuances which you can explore on your own.
Below image summarizes the above explanation. I've taken it from the same documentation that I referred at the starting of this answer - Subscriptions, licenses, accounts, and tenants for Microsoft's cloud offerings
Quoting from the User accounts section in the documentation:
So, all the user accounts and devices of an organization reside in a common Azure AD tenant/instance.
Adding more to existing answers
Tenant is a domain, If these are email addresses of a certain company,
user#exampledomain.com
admin#exampledomain.com
The tenant can be recognized as "exampledomain", in a practical scenario you create a tenant against a company or a client.
Subscriptions are like another logical high-level grouping. For example, you can create a subscription for each environment you work with in the same tenant.
as an example, exampledomain.com tenant can have Development, QA, and Production subscriptions. Those will be billed separately according to the plans you take in
Below are succinct descriptions of key terms and the relationship between them.
They are all sourced from official Microsoft documentation.
Account
Tenant
Identity
Subscription
Resource
Resource Group
Account
To create and use Azure services, you first need to sign up [for an
Azure account].
Source:
Learning Path: Manage identity and access in Azure Active Directory
Module: Create an Azure account
Exercise: Create an Azure account
Tenant
An Azure tenant is a single dedicated and trusted instance of Azure
AD. Each tenant (also called a directory) represents a single
organization. When your organization signs up for a Microsoft cloud
service subscription, a new tenant is automatically created. Because
each tenant is a dedicated and trusted instance of Azure AD, you can
create multiple tenants or instances.
Identity
An identity is an object that can be authenticated. The identity can
be a user with a username and password. Identities can also be
applications or other servers that require authentication by using
secret keys or certificates. Azure AD is the underlying product that
provides the identity service.
Source:
Learning Path: AZ-104: Manage identities and governance in Azure
Module: Configure Azure Active Directory
Exercise: Describe Azure Active Directory concepts
Subscription
To create and use Azure services, you need an Azure
subscription...you're free to create additional subscriptions. For
example, your company might use a single Azure account for your
business and separate subscriptions for development, marketing, and
sales departments. After you've created an Azure subscription, you can start
creating Azure resources within each subscription.
Source:
Learning Path: Azure Fundamentals: Describe Azure architecture and services
Module: Get started with Azure accounts
In Azure, subscriptions are a unit of management, billing, and scale.
Similar to how resource groups are a way to logically organize
resources, subscriptions allow you to logically organize your resource
groups and facilitate billing...An account can have multiple
subscriptions, but it’s only required to have one. In a
multi-subscription account, you can use the subscriptions to configure
different billing models and apply different access-management
policies. You can use Azure subscriptions to define boundaries around
Azure products, services, and resources.
Source:
Learning Path: Azure Fundamentals: Describe Azure architecture and services
Module: Describe Azure management infrastructure
Resource
A resource is the basic building block of Azure. Anything you create,
provision, deploy, etc. is a resource. Virtual Machines (VMs), virtual
networks, databases, cognitive services, etc. are all considered
resources within Azure.
Resource Group
Resource groups are simply groupings of resources. When you create a
resource, you’re required to place it into a resource group. While a
resource group can contain many resources, a single resource can only
be in one resource group at a time. Some resources may be moved
between resource groups, but when you move a resource to a new group,
it will no longer be associated with the former group. Additionally,
resource groups can't be nested, meaning you can’t put resource group
B inside of resource group A.
Resource groups provide a convenient way to group resources together.
When you apply an action to a resource group, that action will apply
to all the resources within the resource group. If you delete a
resource group, all the resources will be deleted. If you grant or
deny access to a resource group, you’ve granted or denied access to
all the resources within the resource group.
When you’re provisioning resources, it’s good to think about the
resource group structure that best suits your needs.
For example, if you’re setting up a temporary dev environment,
grouping all the resources together means you can deprovision all of
the associated resources at once by deleting the resource group. If
you’re provisioning compute resources that will need three different
access schemas, it may be best to group resources based on the access
schema, and then assign access at the resource group level.
There aren’t hard rules about how you use resource groups, so consider
how to set up your resource groups to maximize their usefulness for
you.
Source:
Learning Path: Azure Fundamentals: Describe Azure architecture and services
Module: Describe Azure management infrastructure
Simply put, an instance of Azure AD is what an organization receives when the organization creates a relationship with Microsoft such as signing up for Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365.
A tenant is similar to a forest in an on-premise environment.
An Active Directory forest (AD forest) is the topmost logical container in an Active Directory configuration that contains domains, users, computers, and group policies
Think of a tenant as a user/domain entity that is registered in Azure. Tenants are Azure 'customer' - a unique entity that will be registered in Azure directories.
Subscription is an operational level of grouping resources. Tenants have subscriptions.
Tenant is quite a useful approach, which, in my opinion, is missing in AWS.
I have a MSDN subscription from my work account, when I login, I can see there is already an azure active directory associated (which is company's one I have read only access). I need to provision another AAD directory for development purpose, however when I 'switch' the directory I can see it has no Azure subscription, which I need the credit for.
Question, how to change this behavior, I am thinking either a) change the default directory for my msdn subscription or b) transfer the subscription over to the new directory?
Please help!
Based on the current implementation, an Azure Subscription only trusts users from a single Azure AD.
From How Azure subscriptions are associated with Azure Active Directory:
Every Azure subscription has a trust relationship with an Azure AD
instance. This means that it trusts that directory to authenticate
users, services, and devices. Multiple subscriptions can trust the
same directory, but a subscription trusts only one directory. You can
see which directory is trusted by your subscription under the Settings
tab. You can edit the subscription settings to change which directory
it trusts.
To answer your questions specifically, please see this link on how you can change the trust relationship between an Azure AD and an Azure Subscription.
I have an AAD multi tenant application set up and also multi tenant Native application. They are both production applications. I am planning Azure account ownership transfer (transfer subscription) to another account. Any ideas if the applications and the AAD transfers OK? I cannot have a downtime and the Client IDs, App ID URI, Reply URL and redirect URIs cannot change. Is this expected to transfer smoothly just by using the Transfer Subscription in the Azure portal billing section?
Transferring an Azure subscription should have no effect on anything in your Azure Active Directory.
When you transfer an Azure subscription you might be changing the Azure Active Directory it is associated with, however no change is made to the entities (users, groups, applications) in the Azure Active Directory itself.
As per this article, the impact will be on your Azure subscription: your user/group assignments to resource groups will not be transferred.
That all being said, as with anything production related, you should always err on the side of caution and do your own verification/testing on a test environment.
In my azure account I have 2 directories, lets call them directory A and B.
With some recent changes I need to switch a app service from a subscription in directory A to a subscription that is on directory B.
Is this possible to achieve, and if it is how?
EDIT 1
As directory I mean the directory that you can see in the image below:
EDIT 2
Since It seems that I have mislead people I will try to explain what i want to achieve with images.
I want to move the App Service from the App Service Plan in the directory A as you can see in here:
to the App Service Plan in the directory B that you can see in here:
It looks like you want to move resources between subscriptions. It is possible to do this but there are a few restictions and rules around what you can do.
You can definitely move an App Service between subscriptions. However, in your case, as the subscriptions in question exist in different AD tenants, you will need to change the tenant of one of the subscriptions. You can only do this if you are a Service Administrator and signed in using a Microsoft i.e non organizational account.
Check this reference document from Microsoft, it explains in detail how the transfer process works.
I think we might need some additional information, since it seems that the terms we're using are sometimes equivocal. Microsoft Azure subscriptions are not associated to Azure Active Directories, but to an Service Account. You can add how many Azure ADs you want to an Azure subscription, but the Azure subscription itself will be managed by the service account (which is not necessarily member of a certain Azure AD).
Further, only the service administrator can manage Azure resources, like VMs, App Services and so on. Azure AD admins can only manage identity aspects that define identity life cycles within that specific Azure AD. The service admin could add a co-admin a user from the default Azure AD and that user would then also be able to manage Azure resources, like App Services and so on.
So the Azure App Service is tied to a Azure subscription that is managed by a service account, not by the Azure AD. Please check the official documentation on this topic. Also please clarify exactly what you would like to do.