Performance Efficiency Pillar

The Performance Efficiency pillar of the Azure Well-Architected Framework focuses on ensuring your workload can scale to meet demand and use resources efficiently. It is about matching your system's capacity to the load it serves — not too much, not too little.

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Design Principles

Scale Out, Not Up

Prefer horizontal scaling (adding more instances) over vertical scaling (using a larger instance). Horizontal scaling provides better fault tolerance and can scale to virtually unlimited capacity. Vertical scaling has physical limits and creates a single point of failure.

Use Managed Services

Azure managed services (App Service, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB) handle scaling, patching, and optimisation for you. They allow your team to focus on application logic rather than infrastructure tuning.

Design for Change

Performance requirements evolve as your workload grows. Design your architecture so that you can adjust and optimise without major re-architecture. Use loosely coupled, modular components that can be independently scaled and replaced.

Measure Performance

Establish performance baselines and continuously measure against them. Without measurements, you are guessing. Use load testing, performance monitoring, and capacity planning to make data-driven decisions.

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Scaling Strategies

Horizontal Scaling (Scale-Out)