Rules to Better Azure

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.

In a Specification Review you should include an architecture diagram so the client has a visual idea of the plan. There are lot of tools to help build out an architecture diagram, but the best one is Azure Architecture Center

It is a one stop shop for all things Azure Architecture. It’s got a library of reference implementations to get you started. Lots of information on best practices from the big decisions you need to make down to the little details that can make a huge difference to how your application behaves.

Reference Architectures

Figure: Use Browse Architectures to find a reference architecture that matches your application

The architectures presented fit into 2 broad categories:

• Complete end to end architectures. These architectures cover the full deployment of an application.
• Architectures of a particular feature. These architectures explain how to incorporate a particular element into your architecture. The Caching example above explains how you might add caching into your application to improve performance.

Each architecture comes with comprehensive documentation providing all the information you need to build and deploy the solution.

Best Practices

Figure: Use Explore Best Practices to find information on particular best practice

The Best Practices is a very broad set of documentation from things like performance tuning all the way through to designing for resiliency and some of the more common types of applications and their requirements. Because of this there is almost always something useful, no matter what stage your application is at. Many teams will add a Sprint goal of looking at one best practise per Sprint or at regular intervals. The Product Owner would then help prioritise which areas should be focussed on first.

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.

Figure: The Well-Architected Framework includes the five pillars of architectural excellence. Surrounding the Well-Architected Framework are six supporting elements

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.