Optimize your cloud with Azure well-architected framework, Azure advisor and Advisor score

In this article I'll introduce Well-architected framework, Azure advisor and Advisor score. More importantly I'll illustrate how they are interconnected and how can we use them together to achieve cloud excellence.

Azure well-architected framework

Microsoft Azure has a large collection of features categorized into IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. It is very difficult for us to gain expertise on each workload. 

As a solution, Microsoft has introduced the well-architected framework which guides us on implementing Azure services with best practices. Furthermore, it assists us on operating and governing services those are already implemented in our tenant.

The Well-architected framework is built with five pillars. When implementing or operating Azure services we should always consult following pillars. The detailed documentation is available here

1. Cost optimization

Most of the cloud offerings are delivered as pay-as-you-go modal. So we need to be very careful on picking right workloads as you need to select the most cost effective solution. Furthermore when and where to use our resources. Some guidelines are given below

• Pick correct resources
• Setup budgets and cost constraints (limits)
• Allocate and deallocate resources when necessary
• Continuously monitor resources
• Optimize or scale based on usage

2. Performance efficiency

This is discusses how can your workloads meet varying demands in an efficient way. You should consider about

• Design patterns (e.g. CQRS, Event Sourcing, Sharding, etc..)
• Best practices (Autoscaling, Background Jobs, Caching, CDN, Data partitioning)

3. Reliability

Reliability is where the cloud platform assists to minimize the impact of failing resources. Following are the guidelines to optimize the reliability

• Design your landing zones/resources for failure
• Design for self-healing
• Design for scale-out
• Continuously monitor application health
• Design patterns for resiliency 
• Best practices

4. Security

Your workloads need to be secured. Following guideline will help to improve the security

• What identity to use to protect your resources
• Application security
• Data sovereignty and encryption

5. Operational excellence

This discusses the best practices to run your resources in production. 

• Usage of patterns ( e.g. Ambassador, Anti-Corruption layer etc..)
• Continuously monitor health
• Continuously monitor availability
• Continuously monitor performance
• Continuously monitor security
• Continuously monitor SLA
• Continuously monitor usage and audit

Azure advisor

Azure advisor is your personal assistant in the cloud.

It provides you with recommendations and corrective actions improve your cloud workloads. It provides feedback on following areas

• Cost
• Security
• Reliability
• Operational excellence
• Performance

Those are the exact pillars in Well-Architected framework!! 

In order to comply with the well-architected framework for provisioned resources, we need to keep an eye on the Azure advisor. That's it. 

Azure advisor will showcase scanned results of your workloads and some recommendations can be adopted straightaway with a single click

Advisor score

Azure advisor score is the consolidated figure calculated based on your progress towards achieving the excellence in your cloud.

 

You can have the current score as the baseline and set an improved figure as the target. Then you can follow recommended actions to achieve the target score,

Summary

Well-architected framework is a great tool to achieve the excellence in Azure cloud. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. 

You can use Azure advisor and advisor score to keep your tenant complied with the well-architected framework.

Azure Advisor : Your assistant in Cloud

You can have multiple workloads in your cloud. When time goes on you might find it difficult to manually check each and every resource. Most of the time Cloud housekeeping is neglected.

May be your resources are not provisioned with the best practices. Or may be you have security vulnerabilities. Furthermore your resources are not right sized, causing your cost to go up.

Azure Advisor is the centralized service which scans each and every workload and recommend you with best practices to optimize.

You get recommendations on following categories

• Cost
• Security
• Reliability
• Operational excellence
• Performance

We will check few examples from each section

Let's first check on Cost section

As you can see I have two high impact recommendations

Let's first check the quick fix

This VM is not being used at all. We can shut down the VM and reduce our cost.

Let's check Security section

We have multiple security vulnerabilities there

Let's see Reliability findings

It'll show the improvements I can introduce to improve the reliability

Let's find out performance suggestions

Following are some suggestions