What is the Azure Well-Architected Framework?
Answer
The Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding principles to build high-quality cloud solutions. It has five pillars: Reliability: design for failure — use redundancy, availability zones, load balancing, circuit breakers, and health probes. Security: defense in depth — identity, network perimeter, data encryption, least privilege, and threat detection. Cost Optimization: eliminate waste — right-size resources, use Reserved Instances, implement auto-scaling, and monitor spending. Operational Excellence: DevOps practices — CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and automated responses to events. Performance Efficiency: scale appropriately — horizontal scaling, caching, CDN, and choosing the right service tier. Use the Azure Advisor tool for personalized recommendations aligned with these pillars.