Setting up your Azure Subscriptions – learned the hard way

For a project i’ve been developing a Pilot using Azure VM’s. The VM was all nicely configured, IIS/network/TFS integration/all running smoothly. 2 weeks ago, i could see i would hit spending limit, within a couple of days.

I created a support ticket, with questions about the spending limit, where i found out that removing it could only be done by the account owner (on holiday), resetting it was not possible, and that hitting your limit (what i did), would remove the Virtual machine, disable access to the subscription, so that you are effectively…toast…

The good news…this won’t happen to you! Scott Guthrie announced a number of Windows Azure Improvements today, which would have solved my scenario, and prevents this from happening again, so really nice updates, however in my case….with a disabled subscription….this does not help…

….for me it meant i had to find a workaround…my plan was to create a new dedicated project subscription, and migrate my VM to that subscription….there was only 1 slight problem, for testing purposes i had created a Windows Active Directory.

“...An Azure Active Directory is created and shared among all your subscriptions where you are the Service Administrator of...”

This imposes a challenge:

#1 When migrating data between subscriptions, the first requirement the support team issues is having the same service administrator for the source and target subscription

#2 When you create a brand new subscription, and use the same service administrator account the Active Directory is also in the new subscription

#3 When migrating data between subscriptions, the target subscription must be empty

#1+#2 != #3

Lessons learned:

  • Use a dedicated project subscription
  • Use a dedicated dev / poc subscription
  • Think about the service administrator which is linked to your account, use different service administrators for your DEV / Project subscriptions
  • Be aware that when you create an Active Directory, it cannot be removed without creating a support ticket
  • A support ticket is not free, and can take some time to process
  • Make sure that you have planned your Azure configuration in advance

 

HTH,

Sander

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