A Well-Architected Framework consists of six pillars that describe how you can build, operate, and measure your cloud environment in a secure way.
In an ideal scenario, a review is conducted in the early stage of the design process. Issues can be identified early on and remediated from the start. The outcome of a Well-Architected review is a set of recommendations to optimize your workload across the six pillars. These consist of
Security Protecting applications and data from threats.
Reliability The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function.
Cost optimization Managing costs to maximize the value delivered.
Operational excellence Operations processes that keep a system running in production.
Performance efficiency The ability of a system to adapt to changes in load.
Sustainability Minimize environmental impact
If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.
How to get started
For Microsoft Azure, Microsoft offers a Well-Architected survey you can run to assess your cloud workloads and operational processes against five pillars. The survey focuses on foundational principles and reference architectures in which your cloud workloads are mapped, and different recommendations are proposed to gain guidance for improvements.
It’s important to note that this survey is just a questionnaire. Your answers may or may not reflect the actual state of your cloud architecture.
For existing resources, you can plug Azure Advisor into your survey to merge its recommendations with your responses. This will help you pinpoint specific resources that can be improved across these five pillars.
How to make it valuable
As we mentioned above, the Well-Architected survey can be enriched with Azure Advisor, but we also recommend measuring your cloud configuration from a technical perspective with a deep scan of your cloud workloads’ configuration.
Cloud environments are ever evolving, that’s why we wouldn’t advise running this as a one-off evaluation, but as a continuous measurement to improve your operational efficiency.
To help you reach this goal and focus on providing value for your business, DexMach offers a cloud configuration compliancy scan. This scan captures the configuration state of your cloud workloads and maps these to Well-Architected best practices. The results can be easily consumed throughout your IT teams with an insightful dashboard.
