Cloud computing is redefining how modern services and applications are designed. Instead of building traditional monoliths, applications are broken down into smaller, decentralized microservices. And instead of running on a traditional server, they are using serverless services where you don’t have to worry about infrastructure at all and only pay for the services you actually use. Microservices typically communicate with other microservices by through APIs and asynchronous messaging. This allows applications to scale more efficiently, be more cost effective and easier to replace and deploy. Cloud platforms and microservices ask for a different type of architecture.

The are many cloud providers in the market, but Microsoft Azure is one of the biggest, used by 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft provides a lot of resources on how to architect and develop applications and services on their platform, which will be covered in the next sections.

Azure Architecture Center

The Azure Architecture Center is a great starting point for everyone who wants to start developing services and applications on Azure. It offers proven guidance for architecting solutions on Azure including patterns and practices. You can use the technology choices and guides to decide which services are right for your solution. The guides include all aspects for building apps and services for the cloud, such as operations, reliability, performance, security, and cost optimization. There are a couple of sections that I want to highlight here:

  • Reference Architectures: Microsoft provides a collection of reference architectures that you can use as a starting point for building your own applications and services. This also gives architects a lot of in-depth information about how to combine the different services.

  • Cloud best-practices: This guide presents structured approach for designing scalable, resilient, secure, and highly available applications and services on Azure. A great starting point for gaining knowledge about building distributed apps.

To get started, you can refer to the following overview page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/

Cloud Adoption Framework

The Cloud Adoption Framework is a collection of documentation, best-practices, implementation guidance and tools that can accelerate cloud adoption in organizations. It is focused on different methodologies, such as strategy, planning, readiness, migrations, innovation, governance, managing, and organizing which all together offers a full broad adoption lifecyle framework, which supports organizations throughout each phase of cloud adoption.

To get started, you can refer to the following site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/

Landing zones

Microsoft offers a set of enterprise scale landing zones that you can use to get started as well. A landing zone is an environment for hosting your workloads, preprovisioned through code. Because no single solution will fit all technical environments, there are a couple of landing zone implementations that you can choose from to get started:

  • Enterprise-Scale foundation: This landing zone offers a foundation for organizations to support their application portfolios, regardless of whether the applications are being migrated or are newly developed and deployed to Azure. It enables organizations to start as small as needed and scale alongside their business requirements. It is a good solution when hybrid connectivity to on-premises datacenters is not required from the start.

  • Enterprise-scale for small enterprises: This landing zone is similar to the foundation one above. It also allows organizations to start small. This reference implementation is aimed at organizations that do not have a large IT team and do not require fine grained administration delegation models.

  • Enterprise-Scale with Azure VWAN: This landing zone offers a foundation for organizations that want to focus on application portfolios and hybrid connectivity with ExpressRoute or VPN. It also offers an architecture based on an Azure Virtual WAN network topology.

  • Enterprise-Scale with hub and spoke architecture: This landing zone example is also for organizations that want to support their application portfolios and add hybrid connectivity with ExpressRoute or VPN. If organizations require hybrid connectivity to on-premises locations from the beginning, you can start with this architecture based on the traditional hub and spoke network topology.

Well-Architected Framework

Lastly, I want to cover the Azure Well Architected Framework. This can be used to improve the quality of your workloads on Azure. The framework consists of five pillars of architecture excellence:

  • Cost optimization: The principles of cost optimization are a series of important considerations that can help achieve both business objectives and cost justification.

  • Operational Excellence: This pillar covers the operations processes that keep an application running in production. If focuses on reliable and automated deployments, which can easily roll back or forward when required.

  • Performance Efficiency: Performance efficiency is the ability of your workload to scale to meet the demands.

  • Reliability: In the cloud, we acknowledge up front that failures will happen. Instead of trying to prevent failures altogether, the goal is to minimize the effects of a single failing component.

  • Security: Extremely important nowadays. You should protect your applications and data from threats at all costs.