Sphera’s 5 Pillars of a Well Designed Application #

Focusing on these 5 pillars helps cloud architects and teams build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications. This framework provides a consistent approach for customers and Sphera Partnera to evaluate architectures, and provides guidance to implement designs that scale with our application needs over time.

Operational Excellence #

The operational excellence pillar includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Operational Excellence Pillar article on the Sphera Developer Portal.

Design Principles #

There are six design principles for operational excellence in the cloud:

• Perform operations as code
• Annotate documentation
• Make frequent, small, reversible changes
• Refine operations procedures frequently
• Anticipate failure
• Learn from all operational failures

Best Practices #

Operations teams need to understand their business and customer needs so they can support business outcomes. Ops creates and uses procedures to respond to operational events, and validates their effectiveness to support business needs. Ops also collects metrics that are used to measure the achievement of desired business outcomes.

Everything continues to change—our business context, business priorities, customer needs, etc. It’s important to design operations to support evolution over time in response to change and to incorporate lessons learned through their performance.

Security #

The security pillar includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Security Pillar article on the Sphera Developer Portal.

Design Principles #

There are six design principles for security in the cloud:

• Implement a strong identity foundation
• Enable traceability
• Apply security at all layers
• Automate security best practices
• Protect data in transit and at rest
• Prepare for security events

Best Practices #

Before you architect any system, you need to put in place practices that influence security. You will want to control who can do what. In addition, you want to be able to identify security incidents, protect your systems and services, and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of data through data protection.

We have a well-defined and practiced process for responding to security incidents. These tools and techniques are important because they support objectives such as preventing financial loss or complying with regulatory obligations. The Azure Shared Responsibility Model enables organizations to achieve security and compliance goals. Because Microsoft Azure physically secures the infrastructure that supports our cloud services, you can focus on using services to accomplish your goals.

Reliability #

The reliability pillar includes the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Reliability Pillar whitepaper.

Design Principles #

There are five design principles for reliability in the cloud:

• Test recovery procedures
• Automatically recover from failure
• Scale horizontally to increase aggregate system availability
• Stop guessing capacity
• Manage change in automation

Best Practices #

To achieve reliability, a system must have a well-planned foundation and monitoring in place, with mechanisms for handling changes in demand or requirements. The system should be designed to detect failure and automatically heal itself.

Before architecting any system, foundational requirements that influence reliability should be in place. For example, you must have sufficient network bandwidth to your data center. These requirements are sometimes neglected (because they are beyond a single project’s scope). This neglect can have a significant impact on the ability to deliver a reliable system. In an on-premises environment, these requirements can cause long lead times due to dependencies and therefore must be incorporated during initial planning.

With Azure, most of these foundational requirements are already incorporated or may be addressed as needed. The cloud is designed to be essentially limitless, so it is the responsibility of Azure to satisfy the requirement for sufficient networking and compute capacity, while you are free to change resource size and allocation, such as the size of storage devices, on demand.

Performance Efficiency #

The performance efficiency pillar includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Performance Efficiency Pillar article on the Sphera Developer Portal.

Design Principles #

There are five design principles for performance efficiency in the cloud:

• Democratize advanced technologies
• Go global in minutes
• Use serverless architectures
• Experiment more often
• Mechanical sympathy

Best Practices #

Take a data-driven approach to selecting a high-performance architecture. Gather data on all aspects of the architecture, from the high-level design to the selection and configuration of resource types.

By reviewing our choices on a cyclical basis, we will ensure we are taking advantage of the continually evolving Azure cloud. Monitoring will ensure we are aware of any deviance from expected performance and can take action on it.

Finally, our architectures can make tradeoffs to improve performance, such as using compression or caching, or relaxing consistency requirements.

The optimal solution for a particular system will vary based on the kind of workload you may have, often with multiple approaches combined. Well-architected systems use multiple solutions and enable different features to improve performance.

Cost Optimization #

The cost optimization pillar includes the ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Cost Optimization Pillar article on the Sphera Developer Portal.

Design Principles #

There are five design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:

• Adopt a consumption model
• Measure overall efficiency
• Stop spending money on data center operations
• Analyze and attribute expenditure
• Use managed services to reduce cost of ownership

Best Practices #

As with the other pillars, there are tradeoffs to consider. For example, do we want to optimize for speed to market or for cost? In some cases, it’s best to optimize for speed—going to market quickly, shipping new features, or simply meeting a deadline—rather than investing in upfront cost optimization.

Design decisions are sometimes guided by haste as opposed to empirical data, as the temptation always exists to overcompensate “just in case” rather than spend time benchmarking for the most cost-optimal deployment. This often leads to drastically over-provisioned and under-optimized deployments.

Using the appropriate instances and resources for your system is key to cost savings. For example, a reporting process might take five hours to run on a smaller server but one hour to run on a larger server that is twice as expensive. Both servers give you the same outcome, but the smaller one will incur more cost over time. A well-architected system will use the most cost-effective resources, which can have a significant and positive economic impact.