We will start with a short definition of Plan, Offer, and Subscription to create a basic understanding of those terms.

• Plans are used to group services together that you want to Offer your end users (tenants).
• Offers are created by the Azure Stack service administrator and include one or more Plans. Therefore all the services that are grouped into a Plan are then Offered to the end user through your Offer.
• Subscription is the method used by an end user (tenant) to get (subscribe to) the services the end user wants to use. The end user creates a Subscription in the Azure Stack portal and selects your public Offers. Another approach is for you to approve each Subscription in cases where your Offer is private. Billing is part of a Subscription so that all services/resources used by the end users Subscription is billed to them.

The following diagram provides an overview of the relationship between Plan | Offer | Subscription. There is a large community available at GitHub providing examples for add-ons that you are able to include in your Plan:

As mentioned before an end user (tenant) creates one or more Subscription based on an Offer that you as the provider created and make public. An alternative is a private Offer where you manage (approval of) Subscriptions for your end users. Each Offer contains one or more Plan(s). Each Plan contains the services, defines the region, and might contain quotas for those services within their specific regions. You could also Offer add-ons to add more quota to a Plan or to Offer services such as for monitoring or billing.

The following table provides an overview of all the elements within a Plan and their ramifications:

The key to successfully identifying what Plans and Offers your organization require is a clear understanding of the requirements your end users (tenants) have or which services your organization wants to Offer and how.

Ask the right questions to get an understanding on what to Offer and how.

Using a general approach, those could be:

• What end user groups do you want to Offer which services to?
• How flexible are you with resource allocation within your infrastructure?
• Or what is your largest possible resource allocation for a certain Offer?
• Where do you want to deploy those services to?

Build on the example questions to define the scope of your Offer. Depending on the target end user group, the answers could be quite different.

The first question is the most important one, as it has an influence on the following questions. Who is your end customer and what kind of requirements do they have? Do you provide services to your company or do you Plan to Offer services to the general public or limit it to certain business (partners)?

Let us assume you want to Offer services in your own company. You might have a development team that is writing or adopting applications. This department needs a permanent development environment for programming. For testing purposes they will need additional virtual machines which they will spin off, perform their tests and destroy. Those test machines may not have the same requirements as production machines. For example requirements for I/O performance or high availability of storage, host and network might differ compared to production virtual machines. Based on the requirements of your end user (group) create a Plan that Offers a virtual machine service. For the development team, you may have to create two Plans offering virtual machines but targeting different region. One region contains Hyper-V cluster(s) with the above mentioned lower performance for test virtual machines only and one targeting a standard environment for the development environment. I would recommend to add Quotas to limit the resources used by the development team. This will force them to do some housekeeping. Otherwise the test team might simply deploy new VMs for testing without deleting the older ones even if they are no longer used. This Plan may be used by the whole development team so they will have to decide who may use how many resources assigned to their Plan.

For your operations department you will probably have different requirements and different priorities in regards to the deployment environment and resource allocation. So create a different Plan for this department that will Offer virtual machines as service and might not have any resource quotas assigned. In addition this Plan might be private. Private Plans are not visible to your end users. Therefore you will have to approve the Subscription. Therefore you are able to ensure that your department is involved with every new Subscription/resource allocation or project started by your operations department.

A more general approach for a provider is to create base Plan based on the services Offered. So you might have a Plan offering the service virtual machines and could Offer add-on Plans for location targeting a high performance environments like CPU with higher GHz or storage with higher I/O and shorter latency. Just keep in mind that you will have to create a storage service targeting a high performance storage and a storage service targeting a standard storage in those regions before creating the Plan. Please be aware that within Azure Stack—at the time of writing local is the only Region possible. You may target different location at Azure.