Imagine that you are working in Microsoft Azure. You plan to use one Windows Server 2019 virtual machine, two Windows 11 virtual desktops to connect to it, and the network infrastructure to support open communication between all computers.

You also will deploy Azure Files with Server Message Block (SMB) support. You will use Azure AD services for authentication purposes and to log in to the computers. Further, you will have a firewall deployed with only ports 22, 80, 123, 443 and 3389 open on both the incoming and outgoing rules. The IP segment will be 192.168.0.0 with a subnet address of 255.255.255.0.

Everything needs to be built in the East US geographic location when applicable. In the future, plans to have geographic replication to a West US geographic location will be discussed.

Now, you get to the business of building this design in the Azure Portal. As you are working on this build, you start thinking about making this deployment organized and ‘neat’ in the portal. Soon, one question rises to your mind:

Should I use resource groups to segment this further and make it more organized?

You now start researching more on resource groups and how they are set up and utilized, and you discover that resource groups are logical groups of Azure resources. Some of the items in these groups can include:

Virtual machines
Virtual routers
Virtual firewalls
Virtual Desktop Instances (VDI)
Storage Accounts
Virtual Networks
Databases
Web Apps

And much more!

Furthermore, you discover the most common way to divide resources is production, development, and test.

Now that you know what an Azure Resource Group is, you can put all the resources into one resource group called Production-EastUS. This will keep everything in one logical group and help in the future as plans for the West US replication site are investigated and then implemented.

So, what is an Azure Resource Group? Simply stated, it is a logical group of Azure items deployed to a geographic location.