Azure subscriptions and AAD tenants

Question

Hi,

Can someone please explain the relation between Azure subscriptions and Azure Active Directory tenants.

What I noticed:

1. AAD tenant can exist without subscription. I noticed this when I logged in to portal.azure.com with my @hotmail.com email account.
2. When subscription is created (for example if I create a new Azure account) a tenant is created automatically.

I also noticed that when I tried to create another subscription I had to specify directory which as I understand in this case means AAD tenant.

This makes me think that multiple subscriptions may be linked to one tenant.

At the same time I can create multiple AAD tenants but it is not clear for me how AAD tenants are correlated to subscriptions.

I would highly appreciate if someone could clarify that for me.

Answer 1

@X-Box-11-2021

Thank you for your post!

To hopefully help point you in the right direction or resolve your issue, I'll share a summary below explaining the relationship between Azure Subscriptions and Azure Active Directory tenants.

Azure Active Directory:

Azure Active Directory is a cloud-based identity and access management service. An Azure AD Tenant is a dedicated and trusted instance of Azure Active Directory which will include your users, groups, and applications.

• As you mentioned - you were able to create multiple Azure AD tenants. Each of these tenants will have their unique users, groups, and applications separate from your other tenants.

Introduction to Azure Active Directory Tenants

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Azure Subscription:

An Azure Subscription is associated to an Azure Offer (i.e. free trial or pay-as-you-go), will contain your payment information, scale limits (i.e. resource deployment limit), any administrative boundaries (i.e. policies), and will be the container for your Azure resources.

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Relationship between Azure Subscriptions and Azure Active Directory tenants:

When it comes to the relationship between these two services - Azure subscriptions have a trust relationship with an Azure Active Directory instance (Azure AD tenant). Subscriptions rely on this relationship with Azure AD to authenticate and authorize users, groups, applications, etc.

Note: As shown in above, Azure AD can have a 1:M relationship, but a Subscription can only trust one Azure AD tenant.

Related Stack Overflow Issue:

• What is the difference between an Azure tenant and Azure subscription?

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Additional Links:

• Azure fundamental concepts
• What is Azure Active Directory?
• Associate or add an Azure subscription to your Azure Active Directory tenant

I hope this helps!

If you have any other questions, please let me know. Thank you for your time and patience throughout this issue.

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Answer 2

Hopefully this documentation helps you:

Associate or add an Azure subscription to your Azure Active Directory tenant

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-how-subscriptions-associated-directory

You can have many subscriptions to one Azure AD, and a one-to-one relationship. However, you cannot have many Azure ADs to one subscription as seen above.

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