Planning Workloads with the Well-Architected Framework

Microsoft has different frameworks nurtured for Azure; prominent ones are the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the Well-Architected Framework (WAF). There are other frameworks that are subsets of these prominent ones. In this book, we will be covering the WAF and its five pillars.

Important note

Do not get confused with the Web Application Firewall in Azure, which is also often denoted as WAF. If you see any reference to WAF in this book, that is the Well-Architected Framework.

Just to give you a quick introduction, the WAF deals with a set of best practices and guidelines developed by Microsoft for optimizing your workloads in Azure. As described in the opening paragraph, this framework has five pillars, and the optimization is aligned with these pillars. Let’s not take a deep dive into these pillars at this point; nevertheless, we will certainly cover all aspects of the five pillars as we progress. Further, we will cover the elements of the WAF. When we discuss elements, we will talk about cloud design patterns. This is a lengthy topic, and it’s recommended that you refer to the Cloud Design Patterns documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/) if you are new to this topic. You will see the pattern names coming up when we discuss design principles, but as patterns are out of scope for this book, we will not take a deep dive into this topic.

In this chapter, we will learn why there is a need for the WAF, its pillars, and its elements.