Azure Tenant vs Azure Subscription vs Azure AD Directory

Most of time people are confused between Tenant and subscription . In this post I am going to explain this . Azure is fantastic cloud environment from Microsoft . You can build a future prof infrastructure by using Azure . But to consume this service you have register yourself to Microsoft .

Let me give you an example .

Let’s say you wanna purchase a beautiful shirt for you from Amazon.com . But to purchase anything from their website at first you have  to register yourself . During registration process you will give very basic information about you that will help amazon to recognise you or to do deal with you .

Like the same way Microsoft Azure want few basic information about you to create a account for you in Azure AD database . To create this account you can provide your organisation mail id or microsoft(outlook.com / hotmail.com) id . This ID consider as privileged account . Azure AD contact with Microsoft Hotmail server to verify your identity . After this process Azure AD allow you to create a talent name and Azure AD will provide you a globally unique ID . That is your Account identifier .

Azure AD tenant ID : subhenduxxxx.onmicrosoft.com . Now subscription is the control limit of you . What you can do and for how long you can do that is define by your subscription that is assigned by Microsoft or purchase by you .

Like , I do have MSDN subscription . In this subscription I can use 100$ per month for a complete year .

So in simple word tenant id is your digital identity provided by Azure AD and subscription define limit of use of Azure environment . Once you have your subscription then you can create multiple directory . Every time you will create a directory it will create a new directory tenant name . But all this tenant will be part of same account .

Directory is a logical separation of your subscription by tenant name .

I believe now you have understood the relation between Directory – Tenant – Subscription .