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

Monitoring

Regularly monitoring resources is crucial to maintaining a strong security posture and detecting vulnerabilities. This detection can occur in the form of proactively searching for anomalous events within enterprise activity logs or reacting to alerts of suspicious activity. It is important to respond to any anomalies or alerts in a prompt and vigilant manner in order to prevent any reduction in security assurance. Additionally, employing defense-in-depth and least privilege strategies are key to designing a strong and secure system.

The following checklist should be used for monitoring security-related events in this workload:

  • Use Azure Monitor to monitor workloads deployed on Azure
  • As part of the incident response plan, invest in building a Security Operations Center (SOC) or SecOps team
  • Traffic from or to applications, access requests, and application communication should be monitored
  • Leverage the secure score in Microsoft Defender for Cloud to review...