What is it?
The Azure Well Architected Framework is a framework from Microsoft which describes five pillars of architectural excellence. It has been created to help architects and solution designers to follow a structured and critical assessment of the solutions they develop. The framework includes the following pillars.
Reliability – The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function
Security – Protecting applications and data from threats
Cost Optimisation – Managing costs to maximize the value delivered
Performance Efficiency – Operations processes that keep a system running in production
Operational Excellence – The ability of a system to adapt to changes in load
Lets now look at the individual pillars.
Cost Optimisation
Some example considerations include;
Has the solution been configured to use Azure Hybrid Benefit, if appropriate? If the organisation already has Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance, a discounted run rate is Azure is available.
Does the solution use Reserved Instanced, if appropriate? This can help you achieve a reduced run rate for Virtual Machines in your solution.
Are you shutting down or removing/recreating resources when you don’t need them?
Can components of the solution be resized to a lower pricing tier or size? This is especially important in non production environments, where you want the same capability as production, but the workloads will be much lower.
Can you move the workload to Platform as a Service technologies? Significant savings can be made by switching a SQL Server VM to Azure SQL for example, if appropriate.
Operational Excellence
Some example considerations include;
Is the solution being deployed and managed by DevOps processes? Are there Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines configured?
How will the solution be deployed, are there multiple environments?
How will the solution be monitored to ensure it is operational? Doe it cover all of the solution components? How are support functions notified of errors?
What processes need to be created to support the solution? What is the cadence of these processes?
Performance Efficiency
Some example considerations include;
How does the solution scale to meet different workload volumes?
How is the performance of the solution measured? What monitoring is in place to capture this?
Reliability
Some example considerations include;
Are the reliability and service level requirements defined? Does the solution and the service it offers have Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives defined?
Has the solution been tested with simulation or a forced failover?
Has the solution been deployed consistently across regions?
Does the solution monitor workload health to determine when to automatically fail over?
Does the solution include a plan to respond to failure and disaster. Having a recovery plan, decision tree and communication plan is key to coping with unplanned outage.
Security
Some example considerations include;
Does the solution use recommended practice for identity and access management? Is the principal of least privilege being used?
Does the solution used role based or attribute based access control?
How does the solution protect its infrastructure?
What application security is in place?
Has data encryption been included, and at which layer? Storage, network, application?
Has data sovereignty been established?
Does the solution integrate with organisations existing SecOps?
Microsoft Documentation
Microsoft’s documentation can be found at the following link.
Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework – Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Docs
How should we use it?
When developing new solutions in Azure, the framework should be applied during a Well Architected review, normally forming part of the design review process. The framework includes principals and checklists that you can use to measure your solution and assess its suitability. Microsoft include tooling to try and take the pain out of this process.
Would you like to know more?
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