The five pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework are reliability, cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and security. While each pillar is important, you can prioritize them based on your workload. Build and manage high-quality workloads using resources that align with Microsoft best practices, guided by the five pillars. These tools, programs, and guidance include the Azure Well-Architected Review, Azure Advisor, comprehensive documentation, partners, support, and service offers, the Azure Architecture Center, and the Well-Architected recommendation process.

Support application recovery from failures at any scale by architecting reliability into your application framework. In traditional app development, reliability meant purchasing layers of redundant, high-end hardware to prevent app failure completely. Because failure inevitably happens, minimizing the impact of a single component failing is essential. When you build for reliability in the cloud, you help ensure a highly available architecture as well as recovery from failures such as data loss, major downtime, or ransomware incidents.

Cost optimization for well-architected workloads means reducing unnecessary expenses and improving operational efficiencies. Create economically efficient workloads by balancing business goals with budget justifications. Manage your Azure spending with the tools, offers, and guidance to help you optimize workload costs, save money, understand and forecast your bill.

In the Well-Architected Framework, operational excellence covers the operations processes that keep applications running in production. Deployments must be reliable and predictable. All systems must be observable because in a large application, logging into virtual machines to troubleshoot an issue or sift through log files is impractical and sometimes impossible. Monitoring and diagnostics provide insight into the system, so that you know when and where failures occur.

To achieve performance efficiency for well-architected workloads, you need to be able to anticipate load increases for your cloud environment to meet business requirements. Unlike on-premises environments, you might not need to make long-term predictions for expected changes to maintain capacity. Take both performance requirements and budget into consideration through well-architected principles as you scale up or out with Azure solutions.

Well-architected workloads rest on a foundation of highly secure services and practices. Security is a fundamental pillar that helps organizations operate, innovate, and scale. As one of the most important aspects of any architecture, security provides confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances against cyberattacks and abuse of data and systems. Protect workloads with the multilayered security of Azure—across physical datacenters, infrastructure, and operations—and stay ahead of evolving threats using AI. Plus, enlist a team of more than 8,500 global Microsoft cybersecurity experts to help safeguard your assets and data in Azure. This allows your SecOps teams to spend time focusing on what matters most to your business.