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

Reliability testing

Periodic testing should be conducted to revisit your design decisions. During testing, we need to confirm the availability and recovery targets are met. If there is a need to improve your architecture, then you should do that. Key Azure services that will be used for building reliability are as follows:

  • Azure Site Recovery: To replicate VMs to a secondary region and in case of a disaster, we can easily bring up the VM from the DR region.
  • Azure Pipelines: In the Operational Excellence and Performance Efficiency chapters, we saw how Azure Pipelines can be used to implement continuous testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. With the help of pipelines, we can validate the reliability of the code and delivery.
  • Azure Traffic Manager: This is a DNS-based load balancer that offers different routing methods, such as priority, weighted, performance, and geography routing, which can be used with applications deployed across multiple regions...