Microsoft has recently introduced Azure Service Groups, now available in public preview—a powerful new way to organize, manage, and monitor your Azure resources. Unlike traditional constructs like management groups or resource groups, Service Groups offer a dynamic, flexible model that adapts to the evolving needs of modern cloud environments.
What Are Azure Service Groups?
Azure Service Groups are tenant-level containers that let you group together any combination of Azure resources—subscriptions, resource groups, or even individual services—across your environment. The key distinction? Resources can belong to multiple Service Groups at the same time, and the groups themselves can be nested up to ten levels deep. This enables you to create multiple logical views of your cloud estate without altering its actual structure.
This is a major shift from traditional, hierarchy-bound constructs. With Service Groups, you get a lightweight, flexible, and decentralized way to manage and visualize cloud resources across teams, environments, or business functions.
Why This Matters
Let’s face it: the complexity of cloud environments grows fast. Between different teams, stages (dev, test, prod), and types of workloads, it’s challenging to keep everything well-structured and visible.
Azure Service Groups offer several key advantages:
- Flexible Cross-Subscription Grouping: Group resources across any number of subscriptions under the same Azure tenant.
- Logical Multi-Membership: A virtual machine could be part of a “Critical Systems” group, a “Finance Department” group, and a “Production Workloads” group—all at once.
- Dynamic Membership: You can add or remove resources manually or programmatically as your organization evolves.
- Low Privilege Requirements: Unlike many governance tools, Service Groups don’t require sweeping permissions to manage. They’re designed to fit within secure operational models.
Real-World Use Cases
Here are just a few ways organizations can benefit:
1. Consolidated Health Monitoring
Group together all resources that support a critical application and view health metrics in aggregate—even if those resources are spread across different subscriptions or resource groups.
2. Simplified Inventory Views
Need an at-a-glance overview of all SQL servers across your cloud estate? Create a Service Group and filter by type. Done.
How to Get Started
Since Azure Service groups are still in preview. You’ll have to request access, through the documentation page: here
Creating your first Service Group is easy:
- Open the Azure Portal.
- Navigate to Management + Governance > Service Groups.
- Click + Add, give your group a unique ID, name, and (optionally) a parent group.
- Add resources as needed—manually or via scripts.
You can find detailed, step-by-step instructions in the official Microsoft documentation.
More information about deploying service groups and assigning resources soon!
Service Groups vs Traditional Scopes
While Service Groups offer greater flexibility, it’s important to understand how they differ from traditional Azure scopes like Management Groups, Subscriptions, and Resource Groups:
| Deployment Scope | Policy and RBAC inheritance | Privelege | Can be nested | Flexible membership | |
| Management Group | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | High | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Service Group | ❌ No | ❌ No | Least | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Subscription | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | High / Varies | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| Resource Group | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | Varies | ❌ No | ❌ No |
In short, Service Groups are ideal for visibility, categorization, and flexible organization, but they’re not intended to replace existing deployment or policy structures.
Things to Keep in Mind
- Preview limitations: Service Groups are not deployment targets, and RBAC or policy inheritance does not flow through them.
- No role-based access customization yet: You can’t define custom roles for specific groups during the preview phase.
- Designed for visibility, not control: Think of them as an overlay for organization and insight, rather than for enforcement.
Final Thoughts
Azure Service Groups are a promising step forward in making cloud resource management more human-friendly. Whether you’re managing sprawling enterprise systems or a multi-team startup environment, Service Groups help you keep a clearer view of what matters.
If you’re managing a complex Azure estate, now’s the time to explore this feature and reshape how you think about organizing your cloud.