Canceling an Azure subscription can be easily done by accessing the Azure Portal.
1) Start typing “Subscriptions”, and select the option
2) Pick the Azure subscription you want to cancel
3) Click “Cancel Subscription”
4) Confirm your decision to get your Azure subscription removed
How to cancel Azure subscription without losing data
Remember that after canceling you will not be able to retrieve information on any resource from that subscription. It will get deleted permanently.
Make sure you download all data before you decide to cancel. And when talking cloud – data is not just different types of storage. You might consider saving the configuration of the very resources you are going to delete – just in case you needed to redeploy them in later.
You can generate ARM templates of your whole resource groups. To do that follow the steps:
- Go to “Resource groups”
- Select the resource group you want to back up
- Click “Deployments”
- Select deployment name
- Click “View template”
Once you have your template – you can store it outside Azure. And when needed – you can deploy it in a different subscription.
You can do this from the Azure portal, by selecting “Deploy a custom template” service, or from Powershell by running the cmdlet “New-AzResourceGroupDeployment”:
New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -ResourceGroupName <RG_NAME> -TemplateFile <TEMPLATE_PATH>
How to download files from storage account before you cancel Azure subscription
Review all of your storage accounts and disks. Download all the files that you might ever need in future.
Downloading multiple files from the storage accounts is easily done from the program “Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer”. There, simply select the files you need (or all of them), right click and select “download”.
Reconsider your reasons behind canceling the Azure subscription
In cloud environments compute power is costly, but storage is cheap. Consider keeping your subscription. Maybe you will want to revisit your project later on. For now you can stop all the compute resources, web apps, de-allocate all public IP addresses. Without compute and traffic costs – your monthly bill will shrink significantly. You can also change the access tier of your storage accounts to cool tier or even archive tier to get as much as 1000x reduction of storage costs. Not big of a price tag for knowing the playground is always there waiting for you to get back.
How not to cancel your drive to the cloud
I hope you’re investigating how to cancel Azure subscriptions simply to close one of the projects, and not to abandon your path to the cloud excellence. Cloud, and Azure in particular is still the way to go for the future of applications. It is scalable, robust, makes security and compliance easier than ever. It brings a number of benefits to the companies and their infrastructure management, as well as to professionals who are dedicated to master this field.
Use resources on Clouded Architecture to build your Azure cloud knowledge, and most importantly – jump over to your next project!