Azure Well-Architected Framework
The Azure Well-Architected Framework helps you to design, build, and continuously improve a secure, reliable, and efficient application.
Start with the Pillars, and align your design choices with the principles. Then, build a strong foundation for your workload based on technical design areas. Finally, use review tools to assess your readiness in deploying to production.
When you're building an Azure architecture, there are many considerations to keep in mind. You want your architecture to be secure, scalable, available, and recoverable. To make that possible, you have to make decisions based on cost, organizational priorities, and risk.
Pillars
The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding tenets to build high-quality solutions on Azure. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to designing an architecture, but there are some universal concepts that apply regardless of the architecture, technology, or cloud provider.
These concepts aren't all-inclusive, but focusing on them can help you build a reliable, secure, and flexible foundation for your application.
The Azure Well-Architected Framework consists of five pillars:
| Pillar | Workload Concern | Principles |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability | Resiliency, availability, recovery | Design for business requirements, resilience, recovery, and operations, while keeping it simple. |
| Security | Data protection, threat detection, and mitigation | Protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability. |
| Cost Optimization | Cost modeling, budgets, reduce waste | Optimize on usage and rate utilization while keeping a cost-efficient mindset. |
| Operational Excellence | Holistic observability, DevOps practices | Streamline operations with standards, comprehensive monitoring, and safe deployment practices. |
| Performance Efficiency | Scalability, load testing | Scale horizontally, test early and often, and monitor the health of the solution. |
Reliability
Every architect's worst fear is having an architecture fail with no way to recover it. A successful cloud environment is designed in a way that anticipates failure at all levels. Part of anticipating failures is designing a system that can recover from a failure within the time that your stakeholders and customers require.
Design Principles
- Design for business requirements
- Design for resilience
- Design for recovery
- Design for operations
- Keep it simple
Security
Data is the most valuable piece of your organization's technical footprint. In this pillar, you focus on securing access to your architecture through authentication and protecting your application and data from network vulnerabilities. You should also protect the integrity of your data through tools like encryption.
You must think about security throughout the entire lifecycle of your application, from design and implementation to deployment and operations. The cloud provides protections against various threats, such as network intrusion and DDoS attacks. But you still need to build security into your application, processes, and organizational culture.
Design Principles
- Plan your security readiness
- Design to protect confidentiality
- Design to protect integrity
- Design to protect availability
- Sustain and evolve your security posture
Cost Optimization
You want to design your cloud environment so that it's cost-effective for operations and development. Identify inefficiency and waste in cloud spending to ensure you're spending money where you can make the greatest use of it.
Design Principles
- Develop cost-management discipline
- Design with a cost-efficiency mindset
- Design for usage optimization
- Design for rate optimization
- Monitor and optimize over time
Operational Excellence
By taking advantage of modern development practices such as DevOps, you can enable faster development and deployment cycles. You need to have a good monitoring architecture in place so that you can detect failures and problems before they happen or, at a minimum, before your customers notice. Automation is a key aspect of this pillar to remove variance and error while increasing operational agility.
Design Principles
- Embrace DevOps culture
- Establish development standards
- Evolve operations with observability
- Deploy with confidence
- Automate for efficiency
- Adopt safe deployment practices
Performance Efficiency
For an architecture to perform well and be scalable, it should properly match resource capacity to demand. Traditionally, cloud architectures accomplish this balance by scaling applications dynamically based on activity in the application. Demand for services changes, so it's important for your architecture to be able to adjust to demand. By designing your architecture with performance and scalability in mind, you provide a great experience for your customers while being cost-effective.
Design Principles
- Negotiate realistic performance targets
- Design to meet capacity requirements
- Achieve and sustain performance
- Improve efficiency through optimization
General Design Principles
In addition to each of these pillars, there are some consistent design principles that you should consider throughout your 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 can 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.
In an ideal architecture, you'd build the most secure, high-performance, highly available, and efficient environment possible. However, as with everything, there are tradeoffs.
To build an environment with the highest level of all these pillars, there's a cost. That cost might be in money, time to deliver, or operational agility. Every organization has different priorities that affect the design choices that are made in each pillar. As you design your architecture, you need to determine which trade-offs are acceptable and which aren't.
When you're building an Azure architecture, there are many considerations to keep in mind. You want your architecture to be secure, scalable, available, and recoverable. To make that possible, you have to make decisions based on cost, organizational priorities, and risk.
Workloads
Azure Service Guides
Azure Architecture Center
Additional References
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/well-architected/
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/well-architected/pillars