News

Microsoft Intros Azure Well-Architected Framework Best Practices

• By David Ramel
• August 6, 2020

In an effort to address the growing complexity and increasing overhead associated with deploying business-critical applications, Microsoft introduced a set of Azure-architecture best practices aimed at helping developers build and deliver better solutions.

Dubbed the Azure Well-Architected Framework, this guidance is divided into five pillars of architectural best practices: cost management, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security. "These pillars help you effectively and consistently optimize your workloads against Azure best practices and the specific business priorities that are relevant to you or your customers' cloud journey," said Erin Rifkin, Partner Group PM Manager in Developer Relations at Microsoft, in a blog post.
Specifically, Microsoft said its five pillars provide strategies for dealing with:

• Managing costs to maximize the value delivered: "An effective architecture achieves business goals and ROI requirements while keeping costs within the allocated budget."
• Operations processes that keep a system running in production: "To ensure that your application is running effectively over time, consider multiple perspectives, from both an application and infrastructure angles. Your strategy must include the processes that you implement so that your users are getting the right experience."
• The ability of a system to adapt to changes in load: "Prioritize scalability as you design and implement phases. Scalability leads to lower maintenance costs, better user experience, and higher agility."
• The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function: "In a cloud environment you scale out rather than buying higher-end hardware to scale up. While it's always desirable to prevent all failure, focus your efforts in minimizing the effects of a single failing component."
• Protecting applications and data from threats: "Security is one of the most important aspects of any architecture. It provides confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances against deliberate attacks and abuse of your valuable data and systems. Losing these assurances can negatively impact your business operations and revenue, as well as your organization's reputation in the marketplace."

Along with the five architectural pillars, Microsoft detailed some consistent design practices it advises organizations to keep in mind when considering their architecture:

• Enable architectural evolution: No architecture is static. Allow for the evolution of your architecture by taking advantage of new services, tools, and technologies when they're available.
• Use data to make decisions: Collect data, analyze it, and use it to make decisions surrounding your architecture. From cost data, to performance, to user load, using data will guide you to make the right choices in your environment.
• Educate and enable: Cloud technology evolves quickly. Educate your development, operations, and business teams to help them make the right decisions and build solutions to solve business problems. Document and share configurations, decisions, and best practices within your organization.
• Automate: Automation of manual activities reduces operational costs, minimizes error introduced by manual steps, and provides consistency between environments.

The reference framework is meant to be used by organizations in concert with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review, a formalized process in which enterprises examine their workloads through lenses that match up with the five pillars.
"The Azure Well-Architected Review is designed to help you evaluate your workloads against the latest set of Azure best practices," Microsoft said. "It provides you with a suite of actionable guidance that you can use to improve your workloads in the areas that matter most to your business. Every customer is on a unique cloud journey, so we designed the Azure Well-Architected Review to be tailored to an individual company's needs. You can evaluate each workload against only the pillars that matter for that workload, so when evaluating one of your mission-critical workloads, you might examine reliability, performance efficiency, and security first and then later come back and look at the other pillars to improve your operational efficiency and cost footprint."
Also, at the Microsoft Build 2020 developer conference earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a "learning path" for the framework, titled "Build great solutions with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework." It includes six modules, one for the introduction/overview and five others that match up with the five pillars.