Overcome Growing Pains With An Infrastructure Review: Part 1

WHY DO YOU NEED AN INFRASTRUCTURE REVIEW?

Infrastructure solutions inevitably change and expand as organizations undergo rapid growth. The larger your software solution is, the more difficult it is to find a happy medium between your business needs and security, efficiency, or optimization. Infrastructure reviews allow you to find strong points and weaknesses and build your infrastructure according to specific requirements. In this article, you’ll discover the main components of an infrastructure review, including main stages, steps, and examples.

It can be difficult for companies at the beginning of their cloud modernization journey to understand if they are moving in the right direction. The reason? Approaches and methods typically used in traditional data centers cannot be applied to cloud modernization.

Companies that have already adopted the cloud and attempt to optimize it face challenges when considering the features of their cloud provider. This happens because organizations are often focused on building their business and not scaling their infrastructure to a specific provider like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

There are some companies who still hope to review their infrastructure themselves in order to identify opportunities for modernization. However, these companies deal with many questions for which they don’t always have answers. For example, is it reasonable to sacrifice efficiency for cost savings? Is the infrastructure compliant with all security standards? If not, then how can it be fixed? Are our resources used with maximum efficiency?

Cloud modernization experts who conduct infrastructure reviews address these questions by using the appropriate frameworks to assess organizations based on criteria developed explicitly for this purpose.

All leading cloud providers have established “Well-Architected Frameworks” with descriptions and instructions to aid in creating solutions and infrastructure in their ecosystems. As a rule, these frameworks contain so-called “pillars” in various areas, for example, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and more. The pillars consist of essential principles, explanations, reference architectures, design templates, best practices, and standards.

These components build an efficient and productive infrastructure for workloads in any cloud environment. With the help of these frameworks and infrastructure reviews, cloud modernization experts can figure out the strong and weak components of any cloud workload, and build an infrastructure that satisfies the client’s needs.

The Well-Architected Review is a quick way to determine if a solution complies with the current requirements of the existing cloud environment, and whether it is cost-effective, productive, reliable, and secure. However, there are other options for in-depth reviews of specific areas that range from 2 to 8 weeks in duration, depending on the scope. At the very least, a review is a highly effective way to help your organization develop a clear plan to achieve reliability, security, efficiency, and productivity of your entire infrastructure in a relatively short time. A review also helps continue your organization’s journey to cloud modernization.

Azure Well-Architected Framework

Let’s discuss the Azure Well-Architected Framework, the principles of its operation, and the review process in more detail. It is worth noting that these review principles and approaches are relevant to AWS, GCP, Alibaba, and other cloud providers, though the technical characteristics can vary.

Five Pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework

This framework aims to simplify the review process and deliver transparent results that identify any infrastructure’s key pros and cons.

The Azure Well-Architected pillars include the following key areas:

• Operations Excellence is based on system monitoring, testing, code deployment, and infrastructure automation to ensure that the solution handles all day-to-day operations efficiently, uses sufficient resources, and responds quickly to sudden external or internal changes and risks.
• Security ensures compliance with all protocols for protection, confidentiality, data integrity, multi-level user access to applications, and the creation of controls and triggers that will notify about threats.
• Reliability determines whether a software solution performs its role correctly on an ongoing basis. A reliable software solution can be easily adapted to different infrastructure conditions. Reliability identifies the need for data backup and a disaster recovery plan and availability and recovery target testing (SLA, RTO, RPO, etc.).
• Performance Efficiency is based on the efficient use of all IT and computing resources. The resources must meet the software solution requirements. The infrastructure must be constantly monitored, and solutions related to speed and performance must be flexible and contribute to the entire system’s development. One of the paradigms of this pillar is the use of best practices for scaling, caching, and dividing databases into separate independent parts.
• Cost Optimization provides identification and elimination of unnecessary expenses. According to the analysis of the cost history and the client’s needs, it is necessary to develop a plan for further investments in the cloud environment that will allow future scaling without a significant increase in expenses. In this case, various cost reduction techniques can help, some of which aim for an instant effect, while others require more time and effort.

Interested in learning more about the details of an Azure Well-Architected review process? Read the next blog in this series to discover how our cloud solution architects provide recommendations to reduce operating costs, increase productivity and market speed, and enhance software solutions and infrastructure efficiency.

Ready for actionable recommendations that will align your workloads with business priorities? Get started with the Azure Well-Architected Review 2-Day Assessment.

Let's talk about how infrastructure review can optimize your cloud environment.