Introduction
The Performance Efficiency pillar in the Azure Well-Architected Framework helps ensure that your workload accomplishes its purpose within acceptable timeframes.
Performance efficiency is the ability of your workload to adjust to changes in demand. A workload must be able to handle an increase in load without compromising user experience. And when there's a decrease in load, the workload must conserve its resources. Capacity, or how much CPU and memory you have available, plays a major role in performance.
You don't want your workload design to just depend on preconfigured capacity. That approach might work fine up to a point, but after you go over that limit, the workload might slow down or even crash. And if you're under the capacity limit, you're burning through resources that you don't need, which means extra costs.
To keep your workload running smoothly over time, you need a good strategy that helps you stay on top of your performance goals. Don't treat performance like something you'll deal with later if problems come up in production. Instead, consider performance right from the start of the design process.
The concepts described in this module aren't all-inclusive of performance efficiency in a workload, but they represent the core principles and some of their key approaches. For a complete overview of the Well-Architected Framework pillars, check out the Well-Architected Framework as you start planning and designing your architecture.
Each unit in this module dives into one design principle and three approaches for that principle. You can find examples of the approaches in each unit to see how they can be applied to real-world scenarios. The examples are all based on fictional companies.