A lot of software development companies provide their employees with Visual Studio licenses which give access to Azure credit benefits when using these accounts.

These credits are a beautiful way to get started with Azure or to run experiments with. As a default, the company tenant is used as the main tenant for these Azure subscriptions when providing their employees with Visual Studio licenses.

While the company tenant can also have its merits when providing your colleagues IAM access to parts of your subscription, it can also limit you in following along with Azure learning labs when the company tenant does not allow you to register applications with the tenant.

A tenant is a representation of an organization. It’s a dedicated instance of Azure AD that an organization or app developer receives when the organization or app developer creates a relationship with Microsoft– like signing up for Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365.

Microsoft docs

The beautiful truth is we can create our own tenant in Azure using our own subscription and migrate our account to the new tenant.
Even more beautiful is the fact you can probably get away by spinning up a free instance of the Azure Active Directory.

  1. Navigate to the Azure portal
  2. Create a new Azure Active Directory (AAD) by clicking ‘Create a resource‘ in either the menu or the homepage, search for ‘Azure Active Directory‘ and click ok the ‘Create‘ button
  3. Provide a value for the name for the organization and the domain and choose the country or region the AAD will reside in. The choice of country or region will affect the datacenter used to run the AAD.
  4. Wait for the directory to be created. This will take about a minute.
  5. When the directory is created, head over to your subscription. The easiest way to get to your subscription is to search for ‘Subscriptions’ in the search bar at the top of the screen of the Azure portal.
  6. Click the subscription you want to move to the new tenant
  7. On the overview tab, you can notice a couple of action buttons on the top, including a button link ‘Change directory‘. Click the link.
  8. Notice the warnings on the expanded pane on the right. Now actually read the warnings and information to make sure this is a good idea for your particular scenario.
  9. Select the tenant you created in the first steps and click the ‘Change‘ button
  10. Check the notifications (bell icon on top of the portal) and you should see a notification the directory was successfully changed.

Please allow for a couple of minutes for the change to actually propagate through the system. It can take some time for all the moving parts to catch up and until that time you are in subscription limbo.

When Azure is caught up with the subscription tenant switch, you can configure your tenant as you see fit. Since you are a Global administrator on your own tenant there is not really a need to explicitly set permissions to do app registrations, but you could if you wanted to. 🙂

You should not have any issues anymore following along with the Azure labs. That is, you should not run into any problems related to you not having enough permissions on the company tenant.