Quickstart: Create a management group with Go

Article
04/19/2023

Management groups are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple subscriptions. Create these containers to build an effective and efficient hierarchy that can be used with Azure Policy and Azure Role Based Access Controls. For more information on management groups, see Organize your resources with Azure management groups.

The first management group created in the directory could take up to 15 minutes to complete. There are processes that run the first time to set up the management groups service within Azure for your directory. You receive a notification when the process is complete. For more information, see initial setup of management groups.

Prerequisites

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.
An Azure service principal, including the clientId and clientSecret. If you don't have a service principal for use with Azure Policy or want to create a new one, see Azure management libraries for .NET authentication. Skip the step to install the .NET Core packages as we'll do that in the next steps.
Any Azure AD user in the tenant can create a management group without the management group write permission assigned to that user if hierarchy protection isn't enabled. This new management group becomes a child of the Root Management Group or the default management group and the creator is given an "Owner" role assignment. Management group service allows this ability so that role assignments aren't needed at the root level. No users have access to the Root Management Group when it's created. To avoid the hurdle of finding the Azure AD Global Admins to start using management groups, we allow the creation of the initial management groups at the root level.

Azure Cloud Shell

Azure hosts Azure Cloud Shell, an interactive shell environment that you can use through your browser. You can use either Bash or PowerShell with Cloud Shell to work with Azure services. You can use the Cloud Shell preinstalled commands to run the code in this article, without having to install anything on your local environment.

To start Azure Cloud Shell:

Option	Example/Link
Select Try It in the upper-right corner of a code or command block. Selecting Try It doesn't automatically copy the code or command to Cloud Shell.
Go to https://shell.azure.com, or select the Launch Cloud Shell button to open Cloud Shell in your browser.
Select the Cloud Shell button on the menu bar at the upper right in the Azure portal.

To use Azure Cloud Shell:

Start Cloud Shell.
Select the Copy button on a code block (or command block) to copy the code or command.
Paste the code or command into the Cloud Shell session by selecting Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux, or by selecting Cmd+Shift+V on macOS.
Select Enter to run the code or command.

Add the management group package

To enable Go to manage management groups, the package must be added. This package works wherever Go can be used, including bash on Windows 10 or locally installed.

Check that the latest Go is installed (at least 1.15). If it isn't yet installed, download it at Golang.org.
Check that the latest Azure CLI is installed (at least 2.5.1). If it isn't yet installed, see Install the Azure CLI.

Note

Azure CLI is required to enable Go to use the auth.NewAuthorizerFromCLI() method in the following example. For information about other options, see Azure SDK for Go - More authentication details.
Authenticate through Azure CLI.
```
az login
```

In your Go environment of choice, install the required packages for management groups:

# Add the management group package for Go
go install github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-go/services/resources/mgmt/2020-05-01/managementgroups@latest

# Add the Azure auth package for Go
go install github.com/Azure/go-autorest/autorest/azure/auth@latest

Application setup

With the Go packages added to your environment of choice, it's time to set up the Go application that can create a management group.

Create the Go application and save the following source as mgCreate.go:

package main

import (
 "context"
 "fmt"
 "os"

 mg "github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-go/services/resources/mgmt/2020-05-01/managementgroups"
 "github.com/Azure/go-autorest/autorest/azure/auth"
)

func main() {
 // Get variables from command line arguments
 var mgName = os.Args[1]

 // Create and authorize a client
 mgClient := mg.NewClient()
 authorizer, err := auth.NewAuthorizerFromCLI()
 if err == nil {
 	mgClient.Authorizer = authorizer
 } else {
 	fmt.Printf(err.Error())
 }

 // Create the request
 Request := mg.CreateManagementGroupRequest{
 	Name: &mgName,
 }

 // Run the query and get the results
 var results, queryErr = mgClient.CreateOrUpdate(context.Background(), mgName, Request, "no-cache")
 if queryErr == nil {
 	fmt.Printf("Results: " + fmt.Sprint(results) + "\n")
 } else {
 	fmt.Printf(queryErr.Error())
 }
}

Build the Go application:
```
go build mgCreate.go
```
Create a management group using the compiled Go application. Replace <Name> with the name of your new management group:
```
mgCreate "<Name>"
```

The result is a new management group in the root management group.

Clean up resources

If you wish to remove the installed packages from your Go environment, you can do so by using the following command:

# Remove the installed packages from the Go environment
go clean -i github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-go/services/resources/mgmt/2020-05-01/managementgroups
go clean -i github.com/Azure/go-autorest/autorest/azure/auth

Next steps

In this quickstart, you created a management group to organize your resource hierarchy. The management group can hold subscriptions or other management groups.

To learn more about management groups and how to manage your resource hierarchy, continue to:

Manage your resources with management groups