How to deal with Azure Subscriptions for clients? - azure

I'm fairly new to Azure. I have a personal website in the cloud and played around with some stuff, but that's it. Since I have my first client project coming up in which I will use certain Azure functionality, I was wondering on how to deal with billing.
I will of course put all the resources needed for the client under a new resource group, but the thing I'm wondering about is which subscription to link that resource group to.
Option 1 :
I link it to my own subscription. Least interesting as I would have to send the client an invoice every month charging him the costs that I made through my subscription for his project.
Option 2 :
I add a new subscription under my Azure account, using the client's credit card. This is the most interesting for me as I can see all resources under my Azure account and the client gets billed automatically. But you have to convince the client to give you their credit card information so you can create the subscription.
Option 3 :
The client makes his own Azure account, with a subscription under that account using his credit card. This is less interesting for me as I have to manage 2 Azure accounts. But it's more interesting for the client as they can create their own account and don't have to give me their credit card details.
What's the typical way to go about this? Are there other options that I'm missing? Thanks!

This is a poor question over all (for Stack Overflow at least). But common sense says:
they give you access to their subscription(s)
you create resources in your subscriptions, bill them.

Related

Can I convert expired azure subscription to "pay-as-you-go" subscription with a free F1 plan?

I am not sure if I understand how this works and if I could accidentally be charged if I do this?
I want to play around with Azure just for myself, deploy a web app, learn how it works.
I have an old Visual Studio subscription that I got years ago from a company I used to work at.
This subscription is old and disabled now, expired. I have an option to convert it into pay-as-you-go subscription. When I try to do that, it is asking for my credit card. I don't want to use any paid services, I just want to play with a basic free service plan (I believe it is called F1).
If I provide my credit card and convert that subscription to "pay-as-you-go", it is not going to charge me right away for something? I am not very familiar how this works. Thank you.
I am using the pay as you go plan and it required a credit card to subscribe.
It is possible to use the Azure subscription without paying as long as you use the F1 (Free) service plan for any of the services you use.
Once you start using the Basic, Standard or Premium plans, then you will be billed monthly to those services, and almost all those paid plan costs accumulate hourly.
It is possible to use the non-free services as well and use almost nothing as long as you remove the resources soon after use. As with any service, please do check the pricing to ensure you don't use a service longer than is needed.

Moving from Azure for Students to Pay as you go

I made web app for contest and I was using "Azure for Students" subscription for it. But I lost all of my free credits so I decided to move to "Pay as you go" subscription plan but I don't know how.
And when I trying to change subscription I getting message like this:
Can't move resources from disabled subscription
I used 129$ / 100$ from my Student's subscription and I can't enable it.
Any ideas how to fix it?
As mentioned in the Azure for Students FAQ, to continue using Azure after you exhaust your available credits, you may upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go subscription by contacting Azure Support. After you upgrade, you pay only for services you use over the free quantity included.
After you exhaust your available credit or reach the end of 12 months, your Azure subscription will be disabled. If you've reached the end of your 12 months and are still a student, you'll be able to renew your Azure for Students offer. You will be notified shortly before your 12-month period to let you know how to renew. If you are no longer a student, you may choose to upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go subscription.
If you decide not to upgrade at the end of 12 months or after you have exhausted your 100 USD credit, whichever occurs first, any products you have deployed will be decommissioned and you will not be able to access them.
However, you can always export your resource definitions in the form of Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates) to be reused later. Just like application code, you can store the infrastructure code in a source repository and version it. Any one on your team can run the code and deploy similar environments.

Transfer SQL Azure servers, Storage Accounts away from CSP subscription

We have a CSP subscription through a partner, and the whole experience is rubbish. Costing / billing APIs not available, can't use our Office 365 Azure AD, can't use SendGrid, can't see the cost of resources in the portal, loads of features missing. It's rubbish.
We're moving away and want to transfer a substantial number of SQL Azure servers (with many pools and databases) and Storage Accounts (with lots of items) to another, new PAYG subscription, which uses our O365 Azure AD.
#AzureSupport on Twitter pointed me to - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-move-resources
But this says, "The source and destination subscriptions must exist within the same Azure Active Directory tenant."
It suggests two ways forward:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-how-subscriptions-associated-directory
But... The "Change Directory" option is not present for CSP accounts (lo and behold! another missing feature)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-subscription-transfer
But.. Heading to https://account.windowsazure.com/Subscriptions as instructed gives me a 500 error, with "We are sorry, but we could not complete that operation.".
Also.. Of course, the CSP (Ingram) do not offer any of these kinds of options on their sub management portal.
#AzureSupport then recommended I post here.
Can anyone advise / help please? Would be very much appreciated, thank you.
You are currently blocked, as there is not a good workflow to migrate from CSP to Pay-as-you-go, as the below User Voice entry suggests others are looking for the same. Please up vote and comment on this.
Change subscription from CSP to pay-as-you-go
As for getting switched back to PAYG, I suggest exporting your data and importing in to new services that have been set-up under your desired account set-up. If you need the instance names, these will need to be deleted before the data can be imported into the newly created service with the existing instance names, in cases where instances names can be reused after deletion of the particular service.
There is currently no supported means to migrate a subscription away from CSP once migrated, from my investigation.
Use Azure Data Migration Service to migrate from source to target. This though, will not allow you to keep the same instance names, as both the source and target will need to exist at the same time.

How can i transfer the cost of a resource to one of my Bizpark's team member?

We have three developers in my startup and we are members of Microsoft Bizpark.
I am the only back-end developer so i create and control all the resources in our azure portal.
Even though i made the other members as owners of our resources (settings->users) i am still the only one losing credits. I always reach the limit and they always have 150$ left.
Is it possible to transfer the cost of a resource to another member or do i have to create it again from theirs accounts?
Thank you in advance for any response!
I've been using bizspark also, and there is no way to transfer elements between accounts. Depending on the objects you are planning to move, some of them, you will have to create a backup and restore them in the new account.
Basically, you have to create them again. It's a pain, but if you order your components you can get the most out of the 5 accounts wiht 150 usd.

Azure - Credit spread across multiple subscriptions

I have 2 subscriptions on Azure, both of which have MSDN credit associated to each subscription.
At the moment each subscription has an equal amount of credit, however all my virtual machines and cloud services reside on one of the subscriptions, meaning the credit runs down a lot quicker than the other available subscription.
Is there any way to transfer or migrate credit across subscriptions, so I can make the most of the credit available?
You can't transfer free credit between them. The idea of the MSDN credit is for Development and test (not production) purposes for the individuals who have the subscription, so things should be torn down regularly anyway.
There is such a thing as "Organizational Accounts" coming into azure (I think it's still in preview. Although that doesn't unify individual allowances, it does allow control over the individual's accounts.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/dn531048.aspx
Azure MSDN benefit details http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/msdn-benefits-details/

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