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

Tradeoff for cost

The WAF is a framework that covers a set of best practices touching the pillars of cost optimization, namely, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security. One thing you have to remember is an ideal solution does not equate to a low-cost solution; there will be tradeoffs with other pillars such as operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security. The question that you need to ask yourself is: What is the top priority for your business? Is it low cost, no downtime, or high performance? Based on your answer, there will be compromises that you have to accept. Let us cover the tradeoffs between cost and each pillar of the WAF:

  • Cost versus reliability: Reliability and cost are inversely proportional. If you want to implement high availability and disaster recovery for your workloads, that will lead to additional costs. The rule here is to verify whether metrics such as SLAs, RTOs, and recovery point objectives...