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

Design areas

When we design an end-to-end solution with security in mind, we must focus on multiple areas. We cannot just focus on infrastructure security and leave application security. All the areas we are going to cover in this section should be treated based on the return on investment, as a small misconfiguration can lead to security gaps. The following security areas will be covered in this section:

  • Governance
  • Identity and access management
  • Networking
  • Data protection
  • Application and services

Let’s start with the first one on the list: governance.

Governance

The first design area we consider is governance. In this section, we will cover the governance checklist, the Azure Security Benchmark, and the reference architecture shared by Microsoft. Governance is about enforcing compliance and measures to check whether the organization is meeting the organizational requirements while deploying resources to Azure. With the help of Azure Policy...