Overview of the performance efficiency pillar

Performance efficiency is the ability of your workload to scale to meet the demands placed on it by users in an efficient manner. Before the cloud became popular, when it came to planning how a system would handle increases in load, many organizations intentionally provisioned oversized workloads to meet business requirements. This decision made sense in on-premises environments because it ensured capacity during peak usage. Capacity reflects resource availability (CPU and memory). Capacity was a major consideration for processes that would be in place for many years.

Just as you need to anticipate increases in load in on-premises environments, you need to expect increases in cloud environments to meet business requirements. One difference is that you may no longer need to make long-term predictions for expected changes to ensure you'll have enough capacity in the future. Another difference is in the approach used to manage performance.

To assess your workload using the tenets found in the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, reference the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review.

To boost performance efficiency, we recommend watching Performance Efficiency: Fast & Furious: Optimizing for Quick and Reliable VM Deployments.

Topics

The performance efficiency pillar covers the following topics to help you effectively scale your workload:

Performance efficiency topic	Description
Performance efficiency checklist	Review your application architecture to ensure your workload scales to meet the demands placed on it by users in an efficient manner.
Performance principles	Principles to guide you in your overall strategy for improving performance efficiency.
Design for performance	Review your application architecture from a performance design standpoint.
Consider scalability	Plan for growth by understanding your current workloads.
Plan for capacity	Plan to scale your application tier by adding extra infrastructure to meet demand.
Performance monitoring checklist	Monitor services and check the health state of current workloads to maintain overall workload performance.
Performance patterns	Implement design patterns to build more performant workloads.
Tradeoffs	Consider tradeoffs between performance optimization and other aspects of the design, such as reliability, security, cost efficiency, and operability.

Next steps

Reference the performance efficiency principles intended to guide you in your overall strategy.

Principles