Organizations worldwide are moving their operations to the cloud with an aim to become more resilient, productive, efficient, and competitive. Architecting the infrastructure, developing, and deploying the applications, and managing and monitoring the resources in the cloud is not a one-time story and there is scope for continuous improvement. Solutions Architects, Developers and the engineering team are on the lookout for improving the design to optimize cost, strengthen security and reliability and achieve operational excellence throughout the course of cloud lifecycle. In the quest for achieving cloud excellence, professionals must rely on best practices and keep themselves upgraded with new techniques through learning to take on new challenges that can come up during the course and help the business meet goals.
Azure, one of the most popular cloud platforms among enterprise customers has the Well-Architected Framework, which are a set of principles or guiding tenets for cloud professionals. In the following write-up, we will define Azure Well-Architected Framework and let you know how it can benefit your company. We will also highlight some of the Azure training and certification programs and learning methods to follow to understand the framework.
What is Azure Well-Architected Framework and Why is it Important?
Azure cloud platform offers several features and functions, and the cloud engineering team can develop and deploy solutions based on the requirement of the project. Azure Well-Architected Framework is the set of guiding principles that can be followed by Solutions Architects, Development Engineers or any professionals who are building/developing the cloud solutions. The principles help the team to achieve an optimal balance between the five crucial factors of cloud, which is also called the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework namely Cost Optimization, Operational Efficiency, Performance Efficiency, Security and Reliability.
Every cloud workload is different from the other and so are the business goals. While some workloads may prioritize cost optimization and operational efficiency, others may concentrate more on performance, security, and reliability. Microsoft has designed various tools, techniques and learning methods to power cloud engineers throughout the world to meet their goals in the cloud journey.
The framework helps cloud teams to optimize the workloads. Here’s more about the five pillars of cloud architecture and how they can affect your organization.
- Reliability: The team works towards improving the reliability of the workload throughout the cloud lifecycle. They try to ensure that the downtime of the applications is minimal even when there are system failures. The team works towards reducing the recovery time.
- Cost Optimization: The idea of optimizing cost is to increase the value from cloud resources to the business. To achieve this, experts suggest professionals to follow the principle of Well-Architected Framework which is Build – Measure – Learn.
- Operational Excellence: This factor deals with the processes that are involved in the designing and deployment of applications phase during production. Achieving better operational excellence means, automating deployments, ensuring quick roll backs and roll forward when there are issues with the applications launched etc.
- Performance Efficiency: This reflects the ability of the application or workload to scale-up and scale-down based on the traffic or load on cloud resources. The workload must meet the needs of the users through optimal use of resources.
- Security: The cloud teams must ensure security to applications and processes throughout the life of the resources on the cloud. There are various measures the teams must take to achieve this.
Cloud engineering teams must rely on the supporting elements Azure Well-Architected Review, Design Principles, Azure Advisor, Reference Architectures, Documentation, and Partners, Support & Services Offers to improve the quality of workloads.
Architecting Better Cloud Solutions with Azure Training
Microsoft learning partners can help your cloud teams to work on Azure Well-Architected Framework by customizing learning solutions for your needs. With the Azure online training programs, cloud teams will be able to learn the best practices in development and deployment of applications, architecting cloud platform and more. They will learn about the latest technological tools, features and functions in Azure cloud which can help them achieve business goals.
Following are some of the Microsoft Azure Cloud Certification Courses Solutions Architects, Developers and DevOps Engineers look for.