Azure Well-Architected Framework

The Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) is a set of quality-driven tenets, architectural decision points, and review tools intended to help solution architects build a technical foundation for their workloads.

What is WAF?

Azure Well-Architected Framework

Design workloads that achieve business value over time.

As solution architects, you want to build reliable, secure, and performant workloads that maximize the value of investment in Azure infrastructure. Start with the Pillars, and align your design choices with the principles. Then, build a strong foundation for your workload based on technical design areas. Finally, use review tools to assess your readiness in deploying to production.

WAF refresh update

The Azure Well-Architected Framework published a significant content refresh across all five pillars.

  • Design principles include a set of recommended approaches and benefits.
  • Design review checklist drive action through codified recommendations.
  • Design tradeoffs with other pillars.
  • Recommendations on key strategies that fulfill the principles of design.
  • Design patterns based on proven, common architecture patterns, mapped to each pillar.
  • Azure Well-Architected Review tool has been refreshed to align with the new content.
What's new?

Pillars

  • Reliability

    Ensures that the workload meets the uptime and recovery targets by building redundancy and resiliency at scale.

  • Security

    Protect the workload from attacks by maintaining confidentiality and data integrity.

  • Cost Optimization

    Adopt an optimization mindset by at organizational, architectural, and tactical levels to keep your spending within budget.

  • Operational Excellence

    Reduce issues in production by building holistic observability and automated systems.

  • Performance Efficiency

    Adjust to changes in demands placed on the workload by through horizontal scaling and testing changes before deploying to production.

Workloads

  • Oracle on IaaS

    Host Oracle workloads on Azure, which includes not only Oracle Databases, but also applications such as Siebel, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards.

  • SAP

    Evaluate, design, and optimize an SAP workload from premigration to operations.

  • Mission-critical

    Design and operationalize workloads that are expected to be always available and resilient to failures.

  • Hybrid

    Build applications running across on-premises, multicloud, and the edge, ensuring uncompromised security and developer agility.

  • Sustainability

    Plan your path forward, improve your sustainability posture, and create new business value while reducing your operational footprint.

  • IoT

    Resolve architectural challenges for designing, building, and operating IoT solutions according to your requirements and constraints.

  • Azure VMware Solution

    Relocate legacy application virtual machines to Azure VMware Solution as a staging area for the first phase of your migration and modernization strategy.

See example workloads that apply Well-Architected tenets in the Azure Architecture Center

Azure service guides

Browse the service guides

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