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

Achieving Operational Excellence

Operational excellence is the second pillar in the Well-Architected Framework (WAF). In the previous chapter, we covered the first pillar, cost optimization, and we also covered the tradeoffs between the pillars. There is no specific order that states that operational excellence is the second pillar of the WAF. The pillars are arranged in order to provide the best reading experience. The key principle that operational excellence brings to the table is that all deployments must be predictable and dependable. Though it is a bit ambiguous, by the end of this chapter, you will be able to understand how we can bring predictability to our deployments.

We will adopt a similar approach that you have seen in the previous chapter; we will start with the introduction to the pillar, then the design principles. Further, we will discuss automation and release engineering. Let us start with an introduction to operational excellence.