Oh no! Not another buzzword! (Or is it a term? Is buzzterm a word?)
What exactly is a mission-critical application or workload?
Well, it means you're building an app on Azure. And a workload is just a bunch of services, technologies, and resources that support a unified business goal or solution, that meets your needs. You'll usually string together many services, APIs, and data to get the final functionality you're after. Some people might call this a solution instead. Just for clarity, an architecture is when we really dig into how we put together the given solution.
And then what do we mean with the term mission critical? It's basically a business requirement where you need your solution to be highly available, reliable, and performant, or else it's going to have a significant cost to your business, whether it's financial or related to the success of your business (such as safety and overall reputation). For example, if you need five 9s in your business (99.999% uptime), then you're likely looking at a mission-critical and business-critical application (or solution/workload).
Read more of the high-level stuff here:
How do you design a mission-critical workload?
Take a look at these four steps for designing your workload:
- 1—Design for business requirements
- 2—Refer to the mission-critical implementations
- 3—Evaluate the design areas using the design principles
- 4—Deploy a sandbox application environment
Read more:
- Design methodology for mission-critical workloads
- Design principles of a mission-critical workload
- Cross-cutting concerns of a mission-critical workload
But wait, there's more!
See Design areas for a mission-critical workload on Azure. We broke down these design areas to really dig into the specifics for you:
| Design area | Summary |
|---|---|
| Application design | Learn about the importance of a scale-unit architecture in the context of building a highly reliable application. Also explores the cloud application design patterns to ensure reliability aspirations are fully achieved. |
| Application platform | Decision factors and recommendations related to the selection, design, and configuration of an appropriate application hosting platform. |
| Data platform | Make decisions by using key characteristics of a data platform—volume, velocity, variety, veracity. |
| Networking and connectivity | Network topology concepts at an application level, considering requisite connectivity and redundant traffic management. It highlights critical considerations and recommendations intended to inform the design of a secure and scalable global network topology for a mission-critical application. |
| Health modeling and observability | Processes to define a robust health model, mapping quantified application health states through observability and operational constructs to achieve operational maturity. |
| Deployment and testing | Eradicate downtime and maintain application health for deployment operations, providing key considerations and recommendations intended to inform the design of optimal CI/CD pipelines for a mission-critical application. |
| Security | Protect the application against threats intended to directly or indirectly compromise its reliability. |
| Operational procedures | Adoption of DevOps and related deployment methods is used to drive effective and consistent operational procedures. |
Leave a comment if you have any questions or comments (I guess they're called comments for a reason).
This content comes from our mission-critical team, who built this solution: Azure/Mission-Critical. Azure Mission-Critical is an open-source project that provides a prescriptive architectural approach to building highly reliable cloud-native applications on Microsoft Azure for mission-critical workloads. More specifically, this repository contains everything required to understand and implement an "always on" application on Microsoft Azure.
For my personal recommendations...
Here are some other great content sets that you should totally check out:
- Architecting multitenant solutions on Azure
- Architecture for startups
- Solutions across Microsoft platforms:
- Third-party scenarios:
- Ed
You can also check out some of my books at http://aka.ms/MegTheMechanicalEngineer (children's book, with Sailaja and Jesssica) and http://aka.ms/Mapbook (Azure Architecture Maps, with Stephane). You'll find all 20 of my books at http://aka.ms/EdPrice. Leave a review or comment to let me know what you think of those projects as well. Thanks!