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 secure solutions

When you are designing solutions aligned to the security pillar, make sure you cover the areas shown in the following figure:

Figure 7.1 – Key design areas

Figure 7.1 – Key design areas

In Chapter 6, Building Reliable Applications, we learned that the first thing we need to acknowledge is that failures can happen in the cloud, and all we can do is find ways to mitigate the failure. Similarly, while dealing with security, always assume a breach or compromise. We always assume that there is a breach of security, and we define controls to mitigate these breaches. Microsoft has developed a framework called the Zero Trust model (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/zero-trust), which states, “Never trust, always verify.” The three fundamental ideas of the Zero Trust model are as follows:

  • Always verify explicitly
  • Use the principle of least privilege
  • Always assume a breach

While designing solutions, we need to ensure...