Cloud platforms like Azure make designing solutions as efficient as possible. Whether it’s a serverless application or a chunky virtual datacenter, you can get up and running in no time. This however, has both positives and negatives. The negatives often being that this level of pace can mean bad design decisions are made.

Bad design doesn’t always happen due to pace either. Sometimes it is as simple as a solution evolving from proof-of-concept directly to production. We have all seen it happen! This means the correct resiliency, governance and performance criteria are often missed.

To avoid both of the above scenarios, my advice is to shift your thinking when it comes to Azure projects/solutions. Be prepared to spend 80% of your time on design. Delivery, as we already said can be lightning quick, there are few barriers to an efficiently delivered solution if designed correctly.

Thankfully, Microsoft offer an entire site worth of content to help with all of this. The Architecture Center is your first stop for all things design within Azure. Here you will find application architecture guides, cloud adoption frameworks and reference architectures for all of the common scenarios seen in Azure.

I am going to briefly look at three sections that can help with all of your deployments:

Best Practices – Naming Convention

This section covers exactly what you would expect. However, naming conventions are not as easily implemented in Azure as you might expect. One key point being, you cannot rename resources. Therefore, get your naming convention agreed upon and stick to it! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/best-practices/naming-conventions

Application Architecture – Choosing Compute

Did you know there are three tiers of compute in Azure?

1. IaaS – traditional VMs
2. PaaS – managed hosting
3. FaaS – ignore hosting, just code

Offering an excellent design-tree, you can understand quickly what decision could be the right fit for your solution then explore in more depth.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/compute-overview

Reference Architecture – Serverless Web App

One of my favourite sections, covering multiple scenarios. Each offering best practise design and decision points regarding availability, security and scalability. Some cases also offer reference implementations on Github, meaning you can deploy right away.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/serverless/web-app

So what are you waiting for? Head to the Architecture Center and start designing your next deployment with more confidence right now!