Stopping and starting Azure resources
As noted several times throughout this cookbook, not all Azure resources or services are free; in fact, most of them represent commercial services (after all, Azure is hosted by a private company that—just like your organization, or you personally—while offering services to its clients for payment, represents a client to numerous other vendors, who also expect to be paid for their services).
In a production environment, where services are delivered to paying customers, you would normally only stop your resources during maintenance, or when they have been discontinued. However, in a development and testing environment, with no paying customers, you may wish to stop your resources simply to reduce cost.
Important note
Not every Azure resource can be suspended—some can only be deallocated when the resource that they are part of is deallocated, and some will only be deallocated when the resource they are a part of is deleted...