Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework pillars

The Azure Well-Architected Framework pillars drive architectural excellence at the fundamental level of a workload.

Use this matrix to familiarize yourself with the key concepts:

Pillar	Workload concern	Apply the principles	Strike a balance
Reliability	Resiliency, availability, recovery	Design for business requirements, resilience, recovery, and operations, while keeping it simple. Design principles	Tradeoffs
Security	Data protection, threat detection, and mitigation	Protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Design principles	Tradeoffs
Cost Optimization	Cost modeling, budgets, reduce waste	Optimize on usage and rate utilization while keeping a cost-efficient mindset. Design principles	Tradeoffs
Operational Excellence	Holistic observability, DevOps practices	Streamline operations with standards, comprehensive monitoring, and safe deployment practices. Design principles	Tradeoffs
Performance Efficiency	Scalability, load testing	Scale horizontally, test early and often, and monitor the health of the solution. Design principles	Tradeoffs

Important

The reference architectures available in the Azure Architecture Center are designed with the design principles in mind. The architecture articles describe a prescriptive path for applying the design principles and provide a holistic view on the Ten design principles for Azure applications.

Assessment review tool

Assess your workload by using the core pillars to identify and prioritize opportunities for improving the posture of your workloads.

Azure Advisor uses the core pillars as a basis for analyzing your resource configuration and usage telemetry and provides appropriate recommendations.
Azure Advisor score is a core feature of Azure Advisor that aggregates Advisor recommendations into a simple, actionable score. You can categorize the overall score into the core pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. Use the score to prioritize the actions that yield the biggest improvement.