Ten design principles for Azure applications

Follow these design principles to make your application more scalable, resilient, and manageable.

• Design for self healing. In a distributed system, failures happen. Design your application to be self healing when failures occur.

• Make all things redundant. Build redundancy into your application, to avoid having single points of failure.

• Minimize coordination. Minimize coordination between application services to achieve scalability.

• Design to scale out. Design your application so that it can scale horizontally, adding or removing new instances as demand requires.

• Partition around limits. Use partitioning to work around database, network, and compute limits.

• Design for operations. Design your application so that the operations team has the tools they need.

• Use managed services. When possible, use platform as a service (PaaS) rather than infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

• Use an identity service. Use an identity as a service (IDaaS) platform instead of building or operating your own.

• Design for evolution. All successful applications change over time. An evolutionary design is key for continuous innovation.

• Build for the needs of business. Every design decision must be justified by a business requirement.