HowTo: GitHub Enterprise Pay-As-You-Go

In this blog post, I’ll guide you through setting up your GitHub Organization or GitHub Enterprise to be billed through your Azure Subscription.

As mentioned in a previous post, GitHub now supports billing through Azure. This is incredibly useful as it eliminates the need for pre-purchasing licenses and supports a pay-per-use model

Step 1: Create a GitHub Enterprise

Don’t worry, this won’t cost you a dime!
To create a new enterprise, simply click on your profile at the top left of the screen. In the dialog that opens, select ‘Your enterprises’. or use this link: Set up your GitHub Enterprise Cloud trial

On this new page, fill in the required fields and click ‘Create your enterprise’ at the bottom. In the next step, you’ll be asked to add an existing organization or create a new one.

For now, you can simply choose ‘Skip this step’.

Step 2: Configure billing

Now that you’ve set up your GitHub Enterprise, it’s time to configure the billing to be charged through your Azure Subscription. This is especially handy for anyone with an Azure Sponsorship subscription

Enter the required information in the Billing Information overview. Don’t worry, this data isn’t validated, so you can enter anything you like. Click ‘Save’ and then continue to the Shipping Information. Once you’ve filled in those details, click ‘Save’ again.

Step 3: Payment information

Now that we’ve set up the basics, we can move on to configuring our Azure Subscription as the payment method for our GitHub Enterprise instance.

In the Payment Method overview, select ‘Azure Subscription’ and click the green button ‘Add Azure Subscription’.

Make sure you log into Azure as a user who can provide tenant-wide admin consent. This is necessary to install GitHub’s Subscription Permission Validation app on the Azure AD tenant.

The app needs read access to display a list of available subscriptions and is only used during this one-time process of connecting the Azure subscription.

Make sure you select the correct tenant if your account has access to multiple Entra ID tenant’s

After clicking ‘Connect,’ you’ll be redirected to the ‘Active GitHub Enterprise’ page. From there, simply click the ‘Active’ button to enable billing through your Azure subscription.

Why should you use GitHub Enterprises?

Well, GitHub Enterprise offers a couple of benefits and advanced security features such as:

• Code Scanning: To identify potential security vulnerabilities and coding errors.
• Secret Scanning: Detect secrets like keys and tokens that have been checked into your repository.
• Audit Log Events: Track detailed events related to changes in settings, access, user membership, etc.
• Audit Log Streaming: Stream audit and Git events data to an external system.

You can now explore all the advanced features without worrying about your credit card overheating.