Microsoft Azure makes it easy to deploy and manage cloud solutions. However, building mission-critical solutions that are always available and operational remains a challenge that requires extensive platform knowledge and engineering rigor to overcome.
“Tell us what good looks like” is therefore a common request, with organizations seeking opinionated guidance and reference deployments to establish technical confidence and accelerate moving their mission-critical workloads to the Microsoft Cloud.
With this in mind, we have developed an opensource project, which we are pleased to announce is now publicly available on GitHub as a preview.
Guidance for mission-critical workloads
Microsoft's guidance strives to address the challenges of building mission-critical applications by providing organizations with a prescriptive architectural approach for the Microsoft Cloud.
It leverages lessons from numerous customer applications and first-party solutions, and applies Well-Architected best practices to provide actionable and authoritative guidance for building and operating a highly reliable solutions on Azure at-scale.
More specifically, the project contains everything required to understand and implement an 'always on' application on Azure, and is comprised of:
- Architectural Guidelines: a design methodology to guide application teams through the architectural process of building a mission-critical application on the Microsoft Cloud. This is aimed at helping organizations to make informed decisions that are aligned with best practice recommendations and platform roadmaps, juxtaposed with potential trade-offs associated with deviation.
Figure 1 - This conceptual architecture illustrates how different reliability tiers and underlying business requirements influence the target architecture.
2. Fully Functional Reference Implementations: production-grade reference implementations intended to provide a solution orientated basis to showcase mission-critical application development on the Microsoft Cloud, leveraging cloud-native platform capabilities to maximize reliability and operational effectiveness.
The project offers two sample reference implementations today, representing both 'online' and 'connected' deployment scenarios for technical intensity purposes. These implementations are continuously improved and in the process of extended to provide contextualized examples for common industry patterns.
The ‘Online’ reference architecture represents a target technical state on Azure for a simple synthetic catalogue workload scenario. It leverages a reference set of business requirements to achieve an optimized architecture and end-to-end operational wrappers.
Get started here:
To learn more and get started, visit Microsoft's supported documentation or the open-source project on GitHub.
We welcome any feedback you may have and look forward to continuing the development of our guidance while learning from our customers and partners. Comment below or message us at alwayson-project@microsoft.com.