While the primary focus of mission-critical workloads is Reliability, other pillars of the Well-Architected Framework are equally important when building and operating a mission-critical workload on Azure. Is mission-critical only about reliability? Operationalizing mission-critical workloads requires a high degree of engineering rigor and maturity throughout the end-to-end engineering lifecycle as well as the ability to learn from failure. This is a change in mindset for many developers and architects entering the cloud from an on-premises environment reliability engineering is no longer an infrastructure subject, but should be a first-class concern within the application development process. It requires extensive platform knowledge to select the right technologies and optimally configure them to deliver end-to-end functionality.įailure is inevitable in any complex distributed system, and the solution must therefore be architected to handle failures with correlated or cascading impact. However, building mission-critical workloads that are highly reliable on the platform remains a challenge for these main reasons:ĭesigning a reliable application at scale is complex. Microsoft Azure makes it easy to deploy and manage cloud solutions. Video: Mission-critical workloads on Azure The workload must always be available, resilient to failures, and operational. The term mission-critical refers to a criticality scale that covers significant financial cost (business-critical) or human cost (safety-critical) associated with unavailability or underperformance.Ī mission-critical workload therefore describes a collection of application resources, which must be highly reliable on the platform.

The term workload refers to a collection of application resources that support a common business goal or the execution of a common business process, with multiple services, such as APIs and data stores, working together to deliver specific end-to-end functionality. This section provides actionable and authoritative guidance that applies Well-Architected best practices as the technical foundation for building and operating a highly reliable solution on Azure at-scale. The guidance is based on lessons learned from reviewing numerous customer applications and first-party solutions. This section strives to address the challenges of designing mission-critical workloads on Azure.

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