The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding tenets to build high-quality solutions on Azure. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to designing an architecture. But there are some universal concepts that will apply regardless of the architecture, technology, or cloud provider.

These concepts are not all-inclusive. But focusing on them will help you build a reliable, secure, and flexible foundation for your application.

The Azure Well-Architected Framework consists of five pillars:

• Cost optimization
• Operational excellence
• Performance efficiency
• Reliability
• Security

Cost optimization

You’ll want to design your cloud environment so that it’s cost-effective for operations and development. Identify inefficiency and waste in cloud spending to ensure you’re spending money where you can make the greatest use of it.

Operational excellence

By taking advantage of modern development practices, such as DevOps, you can enable faster development and deployment cycles. You need to have a good monitoring architecture in place so that you can detect failures and problems before they happen or, at a minimum, before your customers notice. Automation is a key aspect of this pillar to remove variance and error while increasing operational agility.

Performance efficiency

For an architecture to perform well and be scalable, it should properly match resource capacity to demand. Traditionally, cloud architectures accomplish this balance by scaling applications dynamically based on activity in the application. Demand for services changes, so it’s important for your architecture to be able to adjust to demand. By designing your architecture with performance and scalability in mind, you’ll provide a great experience for your customers while being cost-effective.

Reliability

Every architect’s worst fear is having an architecture fail with no way to recover it. A successful cloud environment is designed in a way that anticipates failure at all levels. Part of anticipating failures is designing a system that can recover from a failure within the time that your stakeholders and customers require.

Security

Data is the most valuable piece of your organization’s technical footprint. In this pillar, you’ll focus on securing access to your architecture through authentication and protecting your application and data from network vulnerabilities. The integrity of your data should be protected too, through tools like encryption.

You must think about security throughout for the entire lifecycle of your application, from design and implementation to deployment and operations. The cloud provides protections against a variety of threats, such as network intrusion and DDoS attacks. But you still need to build security into your application, processes, and organizational culture.