Just like AWS has a Well-Architected Framework to ensure best practice in the cloud, Azure has its own guiding tenets. Consisting of five pillars of architecture excellence, this framework is designed to help users to improve the quality of their workload.
One of these pillars is Performance Efficiency which relates to the ability of a system to adapt to changes in load. In other words, it’s the process of using computing resources efficiently to support on demand changes for delivering workload with maximum performance.
In this blog, we explore the five principles of performance efficiency and why they’re important for your business…
Become data-driven
One of the first steps to improving performance efficiency is to adopt a data-driven culture. How exactly? By providing insights to individuals in your company. Start by obtaining the optimum performance from your analytics solution and ensure you have all of the tools you need to allow everyone to gain data insights.
Then, ensure that all of your data has both the privacy and the security necessary for your organisation. Armed with the knowledge these detailed insights provide, you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t.
Avoid antipatterns
Antipatterns are common but, unfortunately, it’s likely to result in issues with scalability when one of your applications is under great pressure. When testing the performance of a new app, for example, it may behave as expected until it has to handle a large volume of live work.
Issues such as failed user requests may suddenly emerge, which is why you should avoid antipatterns altogether to improve performance efficiency. Microsoft has a few tips and tricks for identifying and fixing these.
Perform load testing
To ensure that your applications can scale effectively and won’t fail during peak times, it’s recommended to perform load tests to specified limits. By performing a load test on all of your applications, you’ll be able to better understand how each of them perform.
The result? You can be sure that your apps will continue to work when you need them to the most – without any risk of downtime.
Understand your billing
As a business, you’ll be able to identify the tradeoffs between the level of performance efficiency and cost through your individual requirements. If you currently use Azure, you’ll already know that they don’t bill based on the cost of resources.
Instead, resources are charged using meters that track usage over time. These are then used to calculate a bill.
Monitor and optimise
The last step to improving performance efficiency in Azure is to monitor and optimise your services and current workload. To achieve this, your overall monitoring strategy must consider the performance of your applications, in addition to scalability.
It’s also important to assess the resiliency of your applications and infrastructure. In order to scale with demand and actively supply resources, you must analyse your metrics.
How we can help
Looking to build future-proof frameworks? Here at ClearCloud, we understand that Microsoft Azure can be daunting – especially if you’re a first-time adopter of cloud computing. Which is why it’s important to have in-house knowledge before completely shifting your processes.
We’ll support your team and educate them with best practice advice, instilling the five pillars of architecture excellence into their learning. And we don’t stop there, because we’ll continue to educate your personnel until they’re architects in their own right. To find out more about how we can help, speak to a member of our team today.
