Azure Quota Groups Explained: Less Admin, More Control

If you’ve ever hit Azure’s quota limits at the worst possible time, you’ll know just how much hassle it can cause. You’re spinning up a new workload, scaling out for a project, or onboarding a new team, and suddenly you run out of quota in one subscription. Cue the support tickets, delays, and the usual round of “there must be a better way” chat with the team.

Well, Microsoft has finally delivered. Azure Quota Groups are now generally available, and if you look after more than one subscription, this is actually a big deal.

In short, quota groups let you share your resource quotas across multiple subscriptions. Instead of managing quotas one subscription at a time, you can now set up a group and allocate resources like vCPUs, storage, or public IPs to cover all the subscriptions in that group.

This means less admin, fewer support tickets, and much more flexibility when it comes to scaling and managing your cloud estate.

If you only run a single Azure subscription, quotas are just an occasional nuisance. But as soon as you start working with multiple subscriptions, keeping track of quotas becomes a real headache.

Before quota groups, if one subscription hit its limit, you had to raise a support ticket or shuffle workloads around. That’s not just time-consuming, it’s disruptive, especially when you need to move quickly.

Now, with quota groups, you can:

• Share quotas across subscriptions, so you don’t end up with unused capacity in one and not enough in another.
• Adjust your own quota allocations without waiting for Microsoft support.
• Scale projects faster, spinning up resources where you need them, when you need them.

Setting up a quota group is pretty straightforward:

1. Create a quota group in the Azure portal or with the CLI.
2. Add the subscriptions you want to the group. You can change these as your needs change.
3. Allocate the resource quotas to the group. Think of it as a shared pool.
4. Monitor usage and tweak as needed.

You still need to keep an eye on your overall limits, but now you’re in control of how those limits are spread out.

Here’s where quota groups make life easier:

• Project work: If you’re spinning up a project across several subscriptions, you can allocate what you need up front and not worry about hitting limits.
• Multi-team set-ups: Different teams can share a pool of resources, so you don’t get one team running out while another has loads spare.
• Business unit or regional splits: If your organisation splits workloads by business unit or region, you can balance quotas based on real demand, not just guesswork.

As with anything new, there are a couple of things to watch out for:

• Make sure you’ve got the right people managing quota groups. You don’t want everyone making changes.
• Keep an eye on usage so you don’t accidentally max out your group. Azure’s monitoring tools can help.
• Microsoft’s documentation is decent, but expect the odd quirk or edge case as more people start using this.

If you want to try quota groups, here’s what I’d do:

1. Check your current quotas and usage across subscriptions. Where are the pinch points?
2. Work out which subscriptions make sense to group together. Think about projects, teams, or business units.
3. Set up a test quota group and see how it works. Start small and build up as you get comfortable.
4. Share what you learn with your team. The more people know about this, the smoother things will run.

Azure Quota Groups might not be the flashiest update, but for anyone managing a growing cloud set-up, they’re a welcome change. Less admin, fewer support tickets, and more control over your resources. What’s not to like?