I recently had the distinct displeasure of being the first to set up a service in Azure on a new tenant at Microsoft.

Of course I first had to faff about adding the company credit card, which took five tries and two days. Then I found I had to create the appropriate resource group, before I could set up a service. Fair enough, it might make sense later to have costs divided up like that. After I got the resource group, I then thought to start simple and spin up a single VM.

This gave me an error message saying that my request exceeded the quota. Which quota? The built-in copilot in Azure chewed on the raw error in its JSONness, and helpfully told me I could find the Azure quota page by searching for it in the Azure portal.

Once I entered the quota page, I was greeted with a message saying that I was now in the new quota experience in public preview mode. After many clicks I found the appropriate line for the desired VM SKU in the desired region, where it said I had used 0 of the quota of 30. So why didn't it work? I tried to request an increased quota, just in case. That process spent five minutes on "please wait", then failed with a generic error message.

At that point I started googling around, and eventually in some forum thread I found the missing piece: my resource group did not yet have a subscription. After more faffing about, I got a subscription associated with my resource group. What is a subscription, you ask, and what is the relation between a tenant, a subscription and a resource group? I haven't the foggiest, but I've clicked enough buttons to make the errors go away. Por ahora.