67% of the organizations operate on cloud-based infrastructure environments, that’s why designing and building a secure cloud environment is critical to ensuring businesses have a strong security posture.
The Azure Well-Architected Framework helps you design, build, and continuously improve a secure, reliable, and efficient applications. For all size organizations optimizing the existing use of the cloud (cost savings), is the top initiative reported among organizations.
What’s The Azure Well-Architected Framework
The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding tenets that can be used to improve the quality of a workload. The Framework is divided into five pillars of architectural best practices:
- Reliability
- Security
- Cost Optimization
- Operational Excellence
- Performance Efficiency
Azure Well-Architected Framework basically focuses on the best and industry-standard practices which you can refer to make sure the application you are running in Cloud is properly architected.
Photo Source: Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework – Azure Architecture Center
Azure Well-Architected Pillars
Cost Optimization
In this pillar, Microsoft tells you about the ways you can control costs in your Azure environment. Moreover, it provides different scenarios for different phases like design, provision, monitor and optimize which you can adopt to implement better controls in terms of visualizing the usage of your resources and ultimately the costs. Learn more here.
Operational Excellence
This pillar describes the ways in which you can achieve substantial reliability and make the processes automated. You will see different scenarios here regarding CI/CD pipelines, using IaC (Infrastructure as code) for your deployments, DevOps practices as well as the importance of incorporating Tests in your application deployments. Click here to learn more.
Performance Efficiency
When you deploy an application in Cloud, you start with a minimum and maximum load in mind and accordingly you assign the computing and storage power. But with time, your application may need more resources or more instances of the same application to handle the plethora of incoming requests. This pillar specifically talks about the ways in which you can achieve better performance from your application with automated scaling out/in or scaling up/down configured. Read more.
Reliability
This pillar talks about how you can save your applications running in Azure from datacenter-level to region-level failure. It lists different scenarios where it would make more sense to use Availability Zones instead of Availability sets, or Recovery Services instead of highly available instances. Click here to learn more.
Security
Last but not the least, this pillar describes different ways in which you can use multiple Azure services to secure your infrastructure starting from Physical security to securing your Data. Click here to learn more.
Additional Tools and Resources
- Well-Architected Review: This is a self-guided review where you must answer multiple questions about your current workloads in Azure. The questions are broken up into categories based on the 5 Pillars. At the end you are given a rating (critical, moderate, excellent) and you are also given recommended actions, documentation, and videos to help you improve your score.
- Azure Advisor: Advisor is a tool native to Azure. It will scan your environment and give you best practices recommendations based on each of the 5 Pillars. Advisor also gives you an Advisor Score, which is an overall score for your environment. However, you can further break down that score into individual scores for each of the 5 Pillars.
Want to hear more?
If you’d like to get a quick introduction to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, please reach out VNEXT experts here to support you, and help you create Well-Architected infrastructures running in your Azure subscription.