Azure Governance

Governance in Azure or any location is a complex topic that requires a lot of thought and planning. During the DevOps Enterprise Summit, Josh Atwell tweeted an excellent summary from what compliance is VS governance.


What are some of the challenges you will face?

  • How do I meet our legal requirements for data soverignty?
  • How do I enable charge back across departments / Teams
  • How do I ensure that someone does not inadvertently change a critical system?

To address these questions, you can break it down into 4 pillars:

  1. Naming Convention
  2. Policies
  3. Resource Tags
  4. Resource Locks

Naming Convention


Verbose Azure subscription names make understanding the context and purpose of each subscription clear.

Sample naming convention:

Company Department Product Line or Service Environment Full Name
TLAB satAZUREday AwesomeService Production TLAB satAZUREday AwesomeService Production
TLAB SocialGaming AwesomeService Dev TLAB satAZUREday AwesomeService Dev


Verbose azure resources names make it easy to understand the purpose and workload.

Resource Naming Covention Examples
Resource Groups: RG-Region-Type-Subtype/Workload RG-CC-VM-Identity, RG-CE-Network
Networking: Vnet-Region-Type-SubType/Workload Vnet-CC-GW, ILB-CE-SQL
Storage Accounts: sa[company][department][region][Type][workload]
Virtual Machines: [Region][Role][Number] ccdc01


Azure Policy is a service in Azure that you can use to create, assign and manage policy definitions.

Policy definitions enfore different rules and actions over your resources, so those resources stay complian with your corporate standards and service level agreements.

See my blog post on Azure Policy for more information.

Resource Tags

Resource Tags are extermely important to associate resources with the appropriate tags. ex: department, customer, environment.

Resources tags are flexible and easy to implement. It can be included in your ARM templates.

Examples of common resource tags are:

  • BillTo
  • Department (or Business Unit)
  • Environment (Production, Stage, Development)
  • Tier (Web Tier, Application Tier)
  • Application Owner
  • ProjectName

Resource Locks


You can apply locks on subscriptions, resource groups and individual resources.