Well-Architected Framework
Microsoft's Azure Well-Architected Framework provides five pillars for cloud excellence:
A Well-Architected review
Reliability52→86
Single region without tested failover. Added zone redundancy, health probes and a rehearsed recovery plan.
Illustrative example
1. Cost optimization
- Right-size resources based on actual usage
- Use reserved instances and spot instances
- Implement auto-scaling to match demand
- Monitor and eliminate waste with Azure Advisor
- Use PaaS services to reduce operational costs
2. Operational excellence
- Infrastructure as code (Bicep, ARM, Terraform)
- CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment
- Comprehensive monitoring and alerting
- Incident response and post-mortem processes
- Regular disaster recovery drills
3. Performance efficiency
- Choose appropriate compute tier (App Service, Functions, AKS)
- Use CDN for static content delivery
- Implement caching at multiple layers
- Optimize database queries and indexing
- Performance testing and capacity planning
4. Reliability
- Multi-region deployment for critical workloads
- Availability zones for high availability
- Automated backups and point-in-time recovery
- Health probes and automatic failover
- Chaos engineering and failure injection testing
5. Security
- Microsoft Entra ID for identity and access management
- Network security with NSGs, firewalls, private endpoints
- Azure Key Vault for secrets and certificate management
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud
- Compliance with regulations and standards (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2)
Reference architectures
Start from the Azure reference architectures for common scenarios:
- Web applications: App Service + SQL Database + Application Insights
- Microservices: AKS + Service Bus + Cosmos DB + API Management
- Serverless: Functions + Logic Apps + Event Grid + Cosmos DB
- Data analytics: Data Factory + Synapse Analytics + Power BI
- AI/ML: Azure Machine Learning + Azure AI services + Databricks