Updates to the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF)
The Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) is a set of guidelines and best practices for designing and running optimised workloads on Azure. It helps you to evaluate your workload design across five pillars: reliability, security, cost optimisation, operational excellence, and performance efficiency. The WAF also provides you with tools and resources to help you improve your workload design and align it with the latest Azure services and features.
Recently, Microsoft announced a comprehensive refresh of the WAF across all five pillars. In this blog post, we will explore some of the key changes and what they mean.
Design principles, review checklists, and tradeoffs
One of the major changes in the WAF is the introduction of design principles, design review checklists, and design tradeoffs for each pillar. These are intended to provide more guidance and clarity on how to design and run optimised workloads on Azure.
Design Principles
Design principles are a set of recommended approaches and benefits for each pillar. They help you to understand the goals and objectives of each pillar and how to achieve them. For example, one of the design principles for the reliability pillar is to “design for self-healing”, which means that your workload should be able to detect and recover from failures automatically.
Design Review Checklists
Design review checklists are a set of questions and recommendations that help you evaluate your workload design against the design principles. They help you to identify gaps and areas for improvement in your workload design. For example, one of the questions for the security pillar is “Do you encrypt data at rest and in transit?” which helps you assess the level of protection for your data.
Design Tradeoffs
Design tradeoffs are a set of considerations that help you understand the potential impact of your design choices on other aspects of your workload. They help you to balance the tradeoffs between different pillars and optimise your workload design for your specific needs and scenarios. For example, one of the tradeoffs for the cost optimisation pillar is that “Increasing availability and reliability may increase costs”, which means that you may need to spend more on redundancy and backup to ensure high availability and reliability.
Recommendations and design patterns
Another major change in the WAF is the addition of more recommendations and design patterns for each pillar. These are intended to provide more depth and breadth on how to design and run optimised workloads on Azure.
Recommendations are key strategies that fulfil the design principles for each pillar. They provide more details and examples of implementing the design principles in your workload design. For example, one of the recommendations for the operational excellence pillar is to “Implement monitoring and alerting”, which means that you should collect and analyse metrics and logs from your workloads and set up alerts and notifications for any issues or anomalies.
Design patterns are based on proven, common architecture patterns mapped to each pillar. They provide more scenarios and solutions on how to design and run optimised workloads on Azure. For example, one of the design patterns for the performance efficiency pillar is the “Cache-aside pattern”, which means that you should use a cache to store frequently accessed data and reduce the load on your backend data store.
Conclusion
The Azure Well-Architected Framework has been updated to provide more guidance and clarity on how to design and run optimised workloads on Azure. It covers more than 100 topics across the five pillars, with more depth and breadth than before. It aligns with the latest Azure services and features, as well as industry standards and best practices. It offers more tools and resources to help you assess and improve your workload design, such as the Azure Well-Architected Review, the Azure Advisor, and the Azure Architecture Center.
If you are an architect or a developer who wants to learn more about the WAF and its updates, you can visit the WAF page here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/well-architected/.
I hope that this blog post has given you a brief overview of the WAF and its changes and what they mean for architects and IT pros. I encourage you to explore the WAF and apply it to your workload design to optimise your workloads on Azure.