Reactivate an Azure Subscription via API – Gov Cloud Edition

I recently had to reactivate an Azure subscription that was cancelled, but I noticed the instructions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/subscription-disabled#the-subscription-was-accidentally-canceled do not work in Azure Gov Cloud. There is no button to reactivate, so I was forced to submit a ticket to Microsoft and they fixed me up. Typically, if a subscription was cancelled, it was done by mistake and the end user needs access ASAP. I didn’t want to wait hours by submitting a ticket to Microsoft in the future, so I started figuring out how I could do this self service style in Azure gov.

I started to research the AZ CLI and PowerShell cmdlets, but nothing was coming up. As a last resort, I look at the API documentation and to my surprise, I found the POST call to enable a subscription https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/subscription/2019-03-01-preview/subscriptions/enable If you noticed, I linked to API version 2019-03-01-preview. The latest version of 2020-09-01 was not working in management.usgovcloudapi.net. I put a code snippet below:

$azContext = Get-AzContext
$azProfile = [Microsoft.Azure.Commands.Common.Authentication.Abstractions.AzureRmProfileProvider]::Instance.Profile
$profileClient = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Azure.Commands.ResourceManager.Common.RMProfileClient -ArgumentList ($azProfile)
$token = $profileClient.AcquireAccessToken($azContext.Subscription.TenantId)
 
$authHeader = @{
    'Content-Type'='application/json'
    'Authorization'='Bearer ' + $token.AccessToken 
}

#commercial uri management.azure.com
#gov uri management.usgovcloudapi.net
$restUri = "https://management.usgovcloudapi.net/subscriptions/$($subscriptionId)/providers/Microsoft.Subscription/enable?api-version=2019-10-01-preview"
Invoke-RestMethod -uri $restUri -Method POST -Headers $authHeader

In larger organizations, this code could be used towards Service Now automation, Azure Automation, Azure Functions, etc to get the client up and running faster. I hope this helps you with your Azure journey. 🙂