Common Architecture Anti-Patterns on Azure

An anti-pattern is a common approach that seems reasonable at first but leads to poor outcomes. Recognising anti-patterns is just as important as knowing best practices. This lesson covers the most common architectural mistakes teams make on Azure, mapped to the Well-Architected Framework pillars, along with the recommended alternatives.

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Reliability Anti-Patterns

Single Points of Failure

The problem: Deploying critical components as a single instance with no redundancy. A single VM, a single database without failover, or a single-region deployment means any failure takes down the entire workload.

Why teams do this: It is simpler and cheaper to deploy a single instance. Redundancy adds complexity and cost.

The fix: Use Availability Zones for production workloads. Deploy zone-redundant services (Azure SQL, Storage with ZRS). For business-critical workloads, implement multi-region deployment with Traffic Manager or Front Door.

No Retry Logic

The problem: Treating all errors as permanent failures. In distributed systems, many failures are transient — temporary network blips, service throttling, brief DNS resolution issues. Without retry logic, the application fails on errors that would resolve themselves within seconds.