Microsoft recently announced a comprehensive refresh of the Well-Architected Framework (WAF) for designing and running optimized workloads on Azure. The refresh provides not only guidance for making architectural trade-offs for users’ workloads, but also gives much more precise instructions on how to implement this guidance within the context of their organization. The design principles present goal-oriented principles that build a foundation for the workload, the design review checklist roughly codified recommendations that drive action, and the trade-offs describe tradeoffs with other pillars. The refresh is specifically aimed at the Core Well-Architected Review option as part of the Well-Architected Review assessment, which now aligns with the new content structure in the Well-Architected Framework. The assessment updates target universal workload design best practices. You can run the assessment on any workload in any platform, not only those in Azure. The assessment covers more aspects of your workload at a deeper technical level. It has 20+ more unique recommendations (375 total) than the previous version of the assessment, but it also has 124 fewer choices to work through. This means you get more tailored guidance with less input required. The two other big cloud providers, AWS and Google, also offer guidance for their platforms with well-architected frameworks. Moreover, AWS recently updated and restructured its Well-Architected Framework. More details on the refresh are available through the What’s new in the Well-Architected Framework video.
