Azure Well-Architected Framework Overview

The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding principles and best practices designed to help you build high-quality solutions on Azure. It provides a structured approach to evaluating and improving the architecture of your workloads across five key pillars. Whether you are building a new application or reviewing an existing one, the Well-Architected Framework gives you a common language and checklist for making sound architectural decisions.

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What is the Well-Architected Framework?

The Well-Architected Framework (WAF) is a design framework published and maintained by Microsoft. It distils the collective experience of thousands of Azure customer engagements into actionable guidance organised around five pillars:

1. Reliability
2. Security
3. Cost Optimisation
4. Operational Excellence
5. Performance Efficiency

Each pillar contains a set of design principles, recommended practices, and trade-off considerations. The framework acknowledges that architectural decisions often involve trade-offs — for example, increasing reliability (by deploying across multiple regions) typically increases cost.

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Pillar 1: Reliability

Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function. A reliable workload is both resilient (it recovers from failures) and available (it is accessible when needed).

Key Design Principles