A resource group in Microsoft Azure is a logical container so to speak. It is used to group a collection of Azure resources, such as virtual machines, VNets, storage accounts, et cetera into logical groupings for easy provisioning, monitoring, and access control.

Resource groups are also very effective for management of costs. A key benefit of using resource groups in Azure is that by grouping related resources together, they typically share a unified lifecycle. Although Azure requires the admin to specify a region when creating a resource group, resources contained within that resource group can span across multiple regions.

The requirement of a resource group being deployed to a specific region comes from the need to store the deployment metadata and definitions associated with that resource group in a specific location. As such, it doesn't dictate that resources belonging to that resource group need to be in the same region as the resource group itself.

As easy as resource groups make management of Azure resources, it's important to use resource groups with care. The key to clean and meaningful use of resource groups is an understanding of the resources that are included in them. For example, if a line of business application requires resources that need to be updated together, it makes sense to group these resources in the same resource group.

It's equally important, however, to use different resource groups to separate out dev/test resources, staging resources, production resources, et cetera. This is important because resources in each bucket so to speak will typically have different lifecycles.

In the upcoming lectures and demonstrations, you are going to learn how to manage resource groups by using policies, resource locks, and tags. You'll also learn how to move resources between resource groups and how to delete resource groups altogether.