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

Designing for reliability

Microsoft has developed a design checklist to ensure the reliability of workloads in Azure. Applications should maintain a percentage of uptime based on the business requirements; this is what we call availability. We need to find the right balance between high resiliency, low latency, and cost. If we focus on a single factor and improve it, then it can have repercussions on other factors. For example, you can deploy multiple VMs to improve resiliency, but this will increase the cost. In a nutshell, we need to find a balance between these factors. The following is the checklist provided by Microsoft for designing reliable applications:

  • Define availability and recovery targets to fulfill your business needs
  • Capture needs to incorporate resiliency and availability into your applications
  • Ensure that the application and data platforms meet your reliability requirements
  • Set up connection paths to enhance the availability
  • Set up availability...