In the world of cloud management, we’ve always been familiar with three main organizational layers:

🔹 Management Groups for governance and policies.

🔹 Subscriptions for billing boundaries and isolation.

🔹 Resource Groups for grouping resources that share the same lifecycle.

But one question has always remained:

“How can I logically group resources that are scattered across multiple subscriptions and resource groups without restructuring my entire Azure environment?”

 

The answer is here: Service Groups ✨

💡 What are Service Groups?

  • A brand-new organizational layer introduced alongside existing ones.
  • They allow you to logically group resources across different scopes.
  • You can create nested hierarchies up to 10 levels deep ⬆️.
  • Most importantly: they don’t change RBAC or policies—so you get flexibility and visibility without impacting security.

 

🎯 Why Do They Matter?

1️⃣ Cross-Subscription Grouping

Bring together all resources for a single application—even if they live in different subscriptions—into one Service Group.

 

📌 Example: A “PaymentsApp” may include an App Service, SQL Database, Storage, and Key Vault, all grouped together seamlessly.

2️⃣ Multiple Perspectives for Different Teams

Each team can create its own Service Group:

  • Operations can group by workloads.
  • Finance can group by cost centers.
  • Compliance can group by regulated resources.

3️⃣ Unified Monitoring

Instead of checking multiple dashboards, Service Groups provide a single health and monitoring view across all related resources.

4️⃣ Secure by Design

Because Service Groups don’t grant or inherit permissions, they align with the Least Privilege principle—offering visibility without expanding access rights.

 

⚠️ Limitations

  • Not for deployments.
  • Not for enforcing policies.
  • No RBAC inheritance.
  • Core purpose: Organization + Visibility + Monitoring.

 

📌 The Bottom Line

Service Groups don’t replace Resource Groups or Subscriptions—they complement them by adding:

  • More flexibility in grouping.
  • Multiple logical views for different stakeholders.
  • Centralized monitoring and health insights.

Moamen Hany | Microsoft MVP