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Introduction to the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework

The WAF is a set of guidelines and recommendations from Microsoft for building a good cloud product from their services on Azure. This section is actually very short vs everything else while the documentation is pretty long in comparison: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/well-architected/

Azure WAF pillars

While a lot of things go into having a strong and stable application, Microsoft chose 5 aspects as the pillars for the WAF:

  • Reliability
    • Anticipation of failure at all levels; the system should be resilient enough to detect, manage, and recover from failures, while still maintaining availability to end users
  • Security
    • Incidents due to security gaps can hurt the business's reputation, operations, and finance. Ask yourself if your defenses are strong enough to stop attacks and limit damage.
  • Cost Optimization
    • Spend less than you earn. Leverage the cost-savings features of Azure services, optimize your code to make the most out of your allotted usage of a given service per month, etc.
  • Operational Excellence
    • The beatings will continue until DevOps are in place, ensuring your business/service has high availability and can easily deploy new updates
  • Performance Efficiency
    • This goes hand in hand with cost optimization: you want to leverage Azure's flexibility to conserve resources when demand is low and utilize resources when demand is high. Use monitoring services and Azure services like AppInsights to see when your services are in demand
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