The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today's challenges and create the future. Build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.
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Getting application architecture right is super hard and often choosing the wrong architecture at the start of a project causes immense pain further down the line when the limitations start to become apparent.
Azure has 100s of offerings and it can be hard to know what the right services are to choose for any given application.
However, there are a few questions that Azure MVP Barry Luijbregts has come up with to help narrow down the right services for each business case.
Azure is a beast of a product with hundreds of services. When you start learning Azure, it can be overwhelming to think about all the different parts and how they fit together. So, it is crucial to know the right tools to make the process as pain free as possible.
Whether you're an expert or just getting started, working towards gaining a new certification is a worthwhile investment.
Microsoft and GitHub certifications verify your skills and knowledge in a variety of technologies, instilling trust with clients and employers.
To help you out, here is a list of the top 9 Azure services you should be using:
The goal of a modern complex software project is to build software with the best software architecture and great cloud architecture. Software developers should be focusing on good code and good software architecture. Azure and AWS are big beasts and it should be a specialist responsibility.
The Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices which form a repeatable process for designing solution architecture, to help identify potential issues and optimize workloads.

Looking at a long list of Azure resources is not the best way to be introduced to a new project. It is much better to visualize your resources.
You need an architecture diagram, but this is often high level, just outlining the most critical components from the 50,000ft view, often abstracted into logical functions or groups. So, once you have your architecture diagram, the next step is to create your Azure resources diagram.
Building cloud-native applications can be challenging due to their complexity and the need for scalability, resilience, and manageability.
There are lots of ways to build cloud-native applications and the overwhelming number of choices can make it difficult to know where to start.
If you use the default Azure staging website URL, it can be difficult to remember and a waste of time trying to lookup the name every time you access it. Follow this rule to increase your productivity and make it easier for everyone to access your staging site.
- Do you know how to choose Azure services?
- Do you know the best tools for learning Azure?
- Do you know the relevant Microsoft and GitHub certifications and associated exams?
- Do you know the 9 important parts of Azure?
- Do you have a Cloud Architect in your projects?
- Do you use Azure Architecture Center?
- Do you use the Well-Architected Framework?
- Visualizing - Do you have an Azure resources diagram?
- Do you use .NET Aspire to simplify cloud-native development?
- UX - Do you rename Azure’s default URL?
- Search - Do you consider Azure Search for your website?
- Do you know how to create Azure resources?
- Bicep - Do you use User-defined Data Types?
- Do you name your Azure resources correctly?
- Resource Groups - Do you know how to arrange your Azure resources?
- Resource Groups- Do you apply Tags to your Azure Resource Groups?
- Cost - Do you have an Azure Spend $ master?
- Do you proactively notify about expected spikes in Azure Resource costs?
- Do you use Entra Access Packages to give access to resources?
- Cost - Do you know how to be frugal with Azure Storage Transactions?
- Do you know how to backup data on SQL Azure?
- Do You Know How to Choose the Right Azure Database Model?
- Security - Do you configure your web applications to use specific accounts for database access?
- Security - Do you give users least privileges?
- Do you know how to find the closest Azure Data Centre for your next project?
- Do you know to pay for Azure WordPress databases?
- Do you know when to use Geo Redundant Storage?
- Do you shutdown VM's when you no longer need them?
- Do you use Azure Policies?
- Do you use Azure Machine Learning to make predictions from your data?
- Do you use Azure Notebooks to learn your data?
- Do you set up Azure alert emails to go to a Teams channel?
- Redundancy - Do you use Azure Site Recovery?
- Do you know how to use slot deployment on Azure?
- Budgets - Do you monitor your costs in Azure?
- Do you reduce your Azure costs?
- Do you keep track of expiring app registration secrets and certificates?
- Do you use Configuration over Key Vault?
- Do you clean up your groups with Entra Access Reviews?
- Do you know which environments you need to provision when starting a new project?
- Do you know how to host Classic ASP on Azure?