Introduction
The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a design framework that can improve the quality of a workload by helping it to:
- Be resilient, available, and recoverable.
- Deliver a sufficient return on investment.
- Support responsible development and operations.
- Accomplish its purpose within acceptable timeframes.
Outages and malfunctions are serious concerns for all workloads. A reliable workload must survive those events and continue to consistently provide its intended functionality. It must be resilient so that it can detect, withstand, and recover from failures within an acceptable time period. It must also be available so that users can access the workload during the promised time period at the promised quality level.
Workload architectures should have reliability assurances in application code, infrastructure, and operations. Design choices shouldn't change the intent that's specified by business requirements. Such changes should be considered significant tradeoffs.
The concepts described in this module are not all-inclusive of reliability in a workload, but they represent the core principles and some of their key approaches when you're designing a workload. For a complete perspective, across all of the Well-Architected Framework pillars, visit the Azure Well-Architected Framework as you start planning and designing your architecture.
Each unit in this module focuses on one design principle and three approaches associated with that principle. The approaches in each unit are supported through the use of examples to help demonstrate how they can be applied to real-world scenarios. The examples are all based on a fictional company.
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you'll understand the five principles of the Reliability pillar and learn three approaches for each of the following:
- Determine the reliability requirements from the business and apply those requirements to your workload design.
- Design your workload to be fault-tolerant and able to degrade gracefully.
- Design your workload to recover from malfunctions ranging from component-level faults to disasters.
- Build observability and testing into your workload design and operations practices.
- Design your workload with a focus on simplicity to minimize risks.
Prerequisites
- Experience with core infrastructure technologies such as data storage, computing, and networking.
- Experience building or operating technology systems to solve business problems.