Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF)

Explore the azure global backbone powering services across many regions, fiber cables and edge sites, and how region pairs and availability zones enable low latency and disaster recovery.

Explore Azure regions and data centers, including availability zones, geography, and the Azure backbone, and see how compliance filters and data center visuals support disaster recovery and sustainability.

Explore the Azure resource hierarchy and governance, from root management groups to subscriptions, resource groups, and resources, and learn how inheritance, policy, and RBAC enforce security and cost controls.

Discover Azure subscription types, including free, student, pay-as-you-go, and enterprise agreement, covering credits and billing timelines, credit card requirements, and when to choose each option.

Explore how Entra ID tenants operate independently from Azure, providing identity services for human, managed identities, and app registrations, while enabling access to Azure resources when needed.

Sign up for Azure via resources link, choose free or pay-as-you-go, and authenticate with a Microsoft account to access 12 months of free services and 200 USD in 30 days.

Learn to set up your Azure environment by managing management groups and subscriptions, including the root management group, and create a demo group with a resource group in North Europe.

Configure a monthly Azure budget for a subscription in cost management, set a threshold, and enable alerts based on actual or forecasted spend to stay informed.

Explore the Azure well-architected framework for improving a workload's quality within a subscription, guided by five principles: resilience, security, return on investment, responsible development and operations, and timely delivery.

The audience for the Azure Well-Architected Framework comprises workload teams focusing on individual workloads, with role-agnostic guidance for architects, developers, operators, and business stakeholders.

Use the well-architected framework as foundation for success in Azure, leveraging proven best practices to build and operate resources, and enable informed decision making through iterative optimization with Azure Advisor.

Explore the five design pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework—reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, and performance efficiency—and apply them to Azure workloads.

Compare the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework with the Well-Architected Framework: CAF guides enterprise cloud strategy and migration, while WAF focuses on a single workload’s five pillars.

Explore Azure compute services through the well-architected framework, focusing on virtual machines as the core example and comparing on premises, Azure Arc-enabled servers, App Services, and Azure Functions.

Explore Azure virtual machines as on-demand, scalable IaaS compute, balancing OS and application control with cloud hardware management; learn VM architecture with virtual networks, subnets, disks, and network interfaces.

Deploy a Windows Server virtual machine in Azure using the portal, configure subscription, resource group, region, image, size, networking, trusted launch, RDP, and optional backups and monitoring.

Learn the reliability design principles for Azure workloads, including resilience to failures, availability commitments, and assuming failure; adopt a comprehensive reliability approach across code, infrastructure, and operations.

Explore the Azure well-architected framework reliability checklist, covering ten recommendations from aligning workloads with business objectives to measuring with Azure Monitor, including redundancy, scaling, resiliency, chaos engineering, and bcdr.

Apply the reliability pillar to Azure virtual machines with ten key practices, including quotas review, zone redundancy, failure mode analysis, VM scale sets, self-healing, and disciplined operations.

Dive into Azure well-architected security design principles, including zero trust, the DCI triad, minimizing attack impact, and rapid detection and response, along with Microsoft's assume breach, verify explicitly, and least privilege access.

Establish a security baseline aligned to compliance and Azure recommendations, enforce a secure development lifecycle with auditable infrastructure-as-code, and implement tagging, segmentation, IAM, encryption, and monitoring.

Apply foundational security baselines for Linux virtual machines and VM scale sets, choose secure VM SKUs with features like secure boot, and automate patching and compliance to harden the OS.

Align design with financial constraints and ROI through cost optimization. Apply long term cost management and FinOps, avoid overprovisioning, and maximize resource utilization.

Adopt a culture of financial responsibility and implement a cost model, data monitoring, and guardrails to optimize Azure workloads within the well-architected framework.

Optimize virtual machine costs by estimating expenses with the Azure pricing calculator and virtual machine selector, matching virtual machine SKUs to workloads, and enforcing cost governance with policies and rbac.

Learn five design principles of operational excellence: DevOps and standardized workflows, predictable and reliable operations, continuous learning with telemetry and data-driven decisions, clear ownership and leadership, and compliance and efficiency.

Assess workload team specializations, formalize planning and documentation, adopt infrastructure as code, build automated pipelines, and establish monitoring and emergency deployment practices for operational excellence.

Monitor virtual machine health with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, leveraging scale sets and load balancers. Implement automated patching, extensions, chaos testing, and change management to sustain operational excellence.

Explore performance efficiency in the Azure Well-Architected Framework by applying adaptive scaling on demand, moving beyond fixed capacity, and balancing cost with continuous testing and optimization.

Define clear performance targets and scale thresholds, then plan capacity to handle on-demand changes; select the right Azure services, collect metrics and logs, and continuously optimize performance.

Set clear performance targets and continuously monitor virtual machines, tuning sku choices, nvme disks, premium ssd disks, and accelerated networking under load to optimize latency, throughput, and cost.

Learn to run a free Azure well-architected review, start an assessment, and select pillars for a core well-architected review. View guidance and export answers to CSV for Azure DevOps tracking.