Microsoft is pushing Azure and I, as many other developers, get access to it through different programs. Some of them are better than others, some expire, etc. So I had a need to transfer all of my used Azure services and data from one subscription to another.

I mentally approached this as some sort of IT admin task and was planning migration strategies but then it hit me that it could be just a switch on the Microsoft’s side specifying which subscription “owns” particular services. This turned to be true but wasn’t easy to discover so I decided to document the process for future reference.

1. Go to Azure support site
2. Click on “Billing Support”
   
3. Select support topic “Transfer Subscription”
   
4. Select sub-topic “Transfer Azure data to different subscription”
   
5. Click “Continue”
6. Select contact method “Web form” (unless you want to call) and click “Continue”
   
7. Now you will have to fill out the details form with your Live ID, contact information, etc. The key part here is specifying your source and destination subscription IDs in the appropriate field
   
   These can be found in the Windows Azure Portal. Click on the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN”, click on “Subscriptions” (or Hosted Services will do too). Now select a subscription (the top item in the tree view) and in the properties on the right you will find “Subscription ID” field in the form of GUID. That’s what you need.

Now you just submit the form and wait. A “Support Professional” will be assigned to your request and will handle everything from there. All in all it took less than 2 days (including some questions I had) to completely move my web roles, storage accounts and SQL Azure databases without any noticeable downtime. Much easier than I anticipated.