The first rule of the new house rules is “Budget first, then the first resource.” In this lesson you put it into practice. You estimate what the Kladde will cost in operation, create a budget with three alert levels, as a script in the repository, and get into the habit of checking after every exercise what is still running.
Who pays for what: billing account, subscription, tenant
Three terms are often mixed up:
- The billing account is the contract with Microsoft: who pays, by which payment method, to which billing address. For individuals and small companies this is usually a Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), for large companies often an Enterprise Agreement. In an MCA, the account is divided into billing profiles (one invoice each) and invoice sections (line items on the invoice).
- The subscription is the unit in which resources are created and billed. Every resource belongs to exactly one subscription. It is also a boundary for permissions and rules: whoever may do everything in the Kladde's subscription may therefore still do nothing in another.
- The tenant is the directory in Microsoft Entra ID with the users and groups. A subscription trusts exactly one tenant; a tenant can have many subscriptions.
One subscription is enough for the Kladde. Companies often separate prod and the rest into subscriptions of their own, so that a mistake in dev never
hits production and the costs are visible separately. Course K4 comes back to this.