Supported Scenarios

The CMS is designed to support a wide range of operational and business models for organizations using Azure Stack Hub. It providescombines thea flexibilitymulti-tier tocommercial hierarchy with flexible deployment patterns, ensuring that both service providers and enterprises can align technical service delivery with organizationalbusiness or commercial requirements.outcomes.

ServicePlatform ProvidersAdministrators

Operate and govern the CMS at the highest level. Typical activities include publishing pricing and plans, managing usage processing, configuring branding and authentication, and ensuring compliance across regions.

Distributors

Represent the top commercial tier beneath the platform. They manage multiple partners, view aggregated billing and commission data, and apply distributor-level commission structures.

Partners

Act as the customer-facing entities for tenants. They onboard tenants, assign subscriptions, and manage billing at the tenant level. Partner-specific pricing and commission rates can be applied where required.

Tenants

Represent the consuming organizations (end customers or internal business units). Tenants manage their own subscriptions and users, while billing and usage data flow upward to their partner and distributor.

Subscriptions

Provide the unit of consumption within a tenant. Subscriptions map workloads to specific plans and quotas, generate usage records, and serve as the basis for billing and invoicing.

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Industry Use Cases

• Service Providers
  Deliver Azure Stack Hub as a multi-tenant service platform. Use the CMS to onboard customers,tenants, publishmeter offersconsumption, generate invoices, and plans, meter resource consumption, and generate invoices automatically. Commission frameworks ensure thatcommissions downstreamflow accurately to partners and resellers are remunerated consistently.distributors.

• Enterprise IT

  
  Adopt the CMS as an internal service management layer. BusinessDepartments unitsbecome tenants, projects or departmentsenvironments can beare modeled as tenants,subscriptions, withand subscriptions allocated for development, testing,chargeback or production workloads. Chargeback and showback capabilitiesreporting allowensures ITcost organizations to allocate costs transparently across internal consumers.transparency.

• Hybrid Cloud Operators
  Consolidate

  Leverageusage the CMS in environments that spanacross Azure Stack Hub and external cloud platforms. Usage data can be consolidated across platforms, enablingApply consistent billing and governance regardlesspolicies ofacross whereall resourcesregions, areeven provisioned.in partially disconnected environments.

  Partners

and Distributors

• Use the built-in commission model to define and apply tiered remuneration structures. Commission calculations are automated and linked to actual consumption, reducing manual reconciliation and ensuring accurate reporting.

  Regulated Environments

  
  Deploy the CMS inwhere industries that require strict oversightcompliance and reporting.auditability are essential. Role-based access control (RBAC), auditusage trails,records, and detailedaudit usagetrails recordssupport provideregulatory theframeworks.

  governance
features necessary to meet compliance obligations.

Out of Scope

The CMS does not replace the core resource providers in Azure Stack Hub (Compute, Storage, Network) or native Azure monitoring tools. Instead, it complements them by adding commercial, operational, and governance layers on top of existing capabilities.