Why Azure Local?
Azure Local extends Azure to customer-owned infrastructure, enabling local execution of modern and traditional applications across distributed on-premises or edge locations. Azure Local can help accelerate cloud and AI innovation by seamlessly delivering new applications, workloads, and services. Providing the ability to deploy Windows and Linux virtual machines (Azure Local VMs), Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Arc for containerized workloads. AKS on Azure Local enables support for additional Azure Arc-enabled services, such as Azure Container Apps or Azure Machine Learning AKS compute target.
Azure Local offers consistent cloud management capabilities while keeping business systems and application data on-premises, helping meet requirements for data sovereignty, low latency, and compliance. For more information, please see What is Azure Local?
What is the Well-Architected Framework?
Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) offers structured guidance and clear recommendations for architects engaged in designing, deploying, and managing cloud solutions. This framework is organized into five key pillars: Reliability, Security, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, and Performance Efficiency. Applying these principles to platform and workload designs promotes the implementation of reliable, scalable, and high-performing architecture patterns for cloud-based systems.
Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment:
We are excited to announce the launch of the Azure Local | Well-Architected Review Assessment. If you're using Azure Local to deploy and operate business-critical workloads, you can use the assessment to answer a list of comprehensive Yes / No questions that align to the five pillars of the Well-Architected framework. Upon completing the assessment questions, you'll receive a risk or maturity score, along with detailed guidance and resource links to help you strengthen your architecture and boost your maturity or risk score.
Depending on your organizational setup, you might need help from various IT teams to complete the questions, such as Azure Local platform admins, application developers or owners, and IT security teams. All questions in the assessment require a "Yes / No" or "True / False" response. For example, if you’ve implemented the feature or concept described in the question, tick the box, to indicate "Yes, we have implemented ABC". If not, leave it unticked.
For the questions you leave unticked, you’re indicating that the described concept or feature hasn’t been put in place. After finishing the assessment, you’ll receive knowledge links that provide guidance on how to implement any features or capabilities you haven’t yet addressed. For further details about using the assessment platform, see the Microsoft Assessment Platform FAQ.
When should I complete the Azure Local WAF Assessment?
You can complete the assessment at any stage of your Azure Local project, however taking the assessment earlier, such as in your design or pre-deployment phase, and incorporating any relevant recommendations into your implementation plans, could help prevent rework or having to update platform or application designs post-deployment.
Demo of the assessment user experience:
A demo of using the Azure Local | Well-Architected Review Assessment, showing the user experience and workflow of answering the Yes/No questions for a fictious companies (Contoso Manufacturing) Azure Local deployment is shown in below:
Animated GIF shown a demo of the Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment
Additional architecture resources for Azure Local
In addition to the Azure Local | Well-Architected Review Assessment, we have published several architecture and design articles for Azure Local in the Azure Architecture Center (AAC) and Well-Architected Framework content platforms, these include reference architectures, best practice information and workload specific guides. This content can be accessed using the links below:
- Azure Local baseline reference architecture | Azure Architecture Center
- Azure Local storage switchless architecture | Azure Architecture Center
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Baseline Architecture for AKS on Azure Local
- Deploy and Operate Apps with AKS Enabled by Azure Arc on Azure Local
- Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Local | Azure Architecture Center
- Architecture Best Practices for Azure Local - Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework
If you have any feedback or comments in relation to the Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment, please send an email to AzS-WAF-Feedback@microsoft.com
Author Bio
Neil Bird is a Principal Program Manager in the Azure Edge & Platform Engineering team at Microsoft. His background is in Azure and Hybrid Cloud infrastructure, operational excellence, and automation. He is passionate about helping customers deploy and manage cloud solutions effectively using Azure and Azure Edge technologies.
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