Book Image

Optimizing Microsoft Azure Workloads

By : Rithin Skaria
Book Image

Optimizing Microsoft Azure Workloads

By: Rithin Skaria

Overview of this book

It’s easy to learn and deploy resources in Microsoft Azure, without worrying about resource optimization. However, for production or mission critical workloads, it’s crucial that you follow best practices for resource deployment to attain security, reliability, operational excellence and performance. Apart from these aspects, you need to account for cost considerations, as it’s the leading reason for almost every organization’s cloud transformation. In this book, you’ll learn to leverage Microsoft Well-Architected Framework to optimize your workloads in Azure. This Framework is a set of recommended practices developed by Microsoft based on five aligned pillars; cost optimization, performance, reliability, operational excellence, and security. You’ll explore each of these pillars and discover how to perform an assessment to determine the quality of your existing workloads. Through the book, you’ll uncover different design patterns and procedures related to each of the Well-Architected Framework pillars. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to collect and assess data from an Azure environment and perform the necessary upturn of your Azure workloads.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: Well-Architected Framework Fundamentals
4
Part 2: Exploring the Well-Architected Framework Pillars and Their Principles
10
Part 3: Assessment and Recommendations

Introducing the reference workload

We will be using a Windows N-tier application on Azure architecture (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/n-tier/n-tier-sql-server) from the Azure Architecture Center as our reference architecture. Various aspects such as networking, load balancing, SKUs used, and performance metrics will be described in this section. We will be using this data to verify the alignment with the principles of the WAF. When you conduct an assessment for your workloads, you can choose any of your solutions and ensure that it aligns with the WAF pillars.

As we continue our discussion of the reference workload, let’s take a look at the architecture.

Architecture

Though we are using the N-tier application reference architecture, as you can see in Figure 8.5, there are some minor differences, such as the Active Directory Domain Services subnet has been removed from the diagram. Nevertheless, the idea is to make you understand...