If you’ve implemented Microsoft Azure as part of your public cloud deployment, you should know about the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. A service that helps enterprises with managing and staying aligned to the framework is Azure Advisor. By leveraging Azure Advisor’s recommendations, you can enhance and refine your Azure services’ cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance.
The framework provides a logical methodology for optimizing cloud-based workloads using a 5-pillar approach. Let’s take a look at each pillar and how they work together.
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Pillar
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Description
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Examples
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Cost Optimization
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Recommendations that accelerate time-to-market while keeping costs to a minimum.
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Workload sizing recommendations.
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Operational Excellence
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Recommendations that improve workload- and application-supporting operations.
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Automation, continuous monitoring, and diagnostic recommendations.
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Performance Efficiency
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Recommendations that enable resource scaling both horizontally and vertically.
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Database configuration, storage configuration, and service availability recommendations.
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Reliability
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Recommendations that improve resiliency, availability, and fault-tolerance.
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Virtual Machine protection and VPN resiliency recommendations.
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Security
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Recommendations that improve security without causing workflow bottlenecks.
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Identity management, access control, application security, and encryption recommendations.
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Advisor provides recommendations based on your deployed Azure services configuration. By analyzing data from various telemetries, it helps you optimize your Azure configuration using the five pillars of the framework as a baseline. Azure Advisor’s cost optimization recommendations aim to reduce your Azure spend by identifying idle or underutilized resources.
To learn more about how this works, check out the Microsoft Azure Backup Pricing article in our Guide to Azure Cost Optimization.
