Get tailored insights with our Advisor Well-Architected assessments

For cloud applications and mission-critical workloads, organizations trust Azure to drive innovation, scale operations, and keep their businesses competitive. But as cloud environments become more complex, enterprises struggle to build secure and reliable cloud infrastructure while maintaining cost efficiency, but achieving this balance can be difficult. We are excited to announce this because we know how important it is for customers to implement better applications with guidance curated to their organization’s needs and demands. Advisor Well-Architected Assessment on AzureCurrently available in public preview.

The Advisor Well-Architected Assessment is a self-guided questionnaire that provides customized, actionable recommendations to optimize your Azure resources and align them with the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) principles. This assessment helps you improve system performance, resiliency, security, and cost efficiency while ensuring operational excellence to maximize the return on your cloud infrastructure. And if you supplement it FinOps Framework—A collection of best practices to optimize cloud spend, drive operational efficiency, and drive business value—enabling organizations to proactively identify cost-saving opportunities, avoid overspending, and ensure their cloud solutions are technically sound and financially sustainable.

In this blog, we’ll introduce the benefits of the Advisor Well-Architected assessment and show you how the assessment can help you achieve optimal infrastructure performance.

What are the business benefits of the Advisor Well-Architected assessment?

The Advisor Well-Architected assessment provides curated guidance after a comprehensive review of your cloud environment based on your organization’s goals. The recommendations generated from this assessment not only help you address potential issues before they become serious, but also help you design systems that ensure maximum resiliency and availability to support your business-critical workloads.

The main advantages are:

• Overall view: The assessment provides a comprehensive view of the workload architecture, enabling customers to improve resiliency, performance efficiency, and more.

• Customized recommendations: Customers receive tailored recommendations based on the Azure Well-Architected Framework to improve their workloads. These recommendations are actionable and come with support links to help with implementation.

• Continuous improvement: Assessments are designed to be part of a continuous improvement cycle, helping customers regularly update and optimize their workloads.

• Integration with operational processes: Recommendations can be exported and integrated into your customers’ operational processes and aligned to the software development life cycle (SDLC) of your workloads for continuous improvement.

• Prioritize your work: Evaluation helps task managers and stakeholders prioritize their work based on the evaluation results, so that the most important improvements can be addressed first.

• Conflict of decisions: The tradeoffs within the Azure Well-Architected Framework represent a strategic advantage because they encourage a holistic approach to designing and managing cloud workloads. Understanding and balancing the interactions between the five pillars enables customers to make informed decisions that align with their business objectives.

The assessment experience is your companion on your journey to excellence in cloud workload optimization. The recommendations help you optimize your cloud infrastructure by reducing unplanned outages, avoiding inflated bills, complying with industry regulations, detecting vulnerabilities, improving performance, and ensuring operational excellence. Therefore, assessing your workloads is not a luxury, but an essential due diligence to ensure an optimized cloud infrastructure.

What is the Azure Well-Architected Framework and how does it interact with FinOps?

Azure is Well designed framework (World Peace Union) A design framework to improve the quality of your workload, covering five pillars:

• Trustworthy: Design systems to recover from failures and meet availability goals.

• security: Protect your applications and data from threats with a layered defense approach.

• Cost Optimization: Maximize business value by balancing costs and performance.

• Operational Excellence: We run and monitor systems to deliver business value and continuously improve processes.

• Performance Efficiency: We design systems that can scale and adapt to changing needs while maintaining efficiency.

FinOps is a cultural practice and operational framework that brings together technology, finance, and business teams to drive financial accountability and maximize the value of cloud investments. The FinOps framework and WAF complement each other by aligning financial management and operational excellence in cloud environments.

While the FinOps Framework focuses on understanding, optimizing, and managing cloud costs, WAF provides best practices for building and maintaining efficient, reliable, and cost-effective applications on Azure. This ensures that organizations achieve financial responsibility and technical excellence in their cloud infrastructure.

FinOps consists of four core domains:

• Understanding Cloud Usage and Costs: Collect and categorize cloud cost and usage data to gain a comprehensive understanding.

• Quantifying Business Value: Connect cloud usage and cost data to the business value it creates.

• Optimize cloud usage and costs: Ensure efficient use of cloud resources and cost efficiency.

• FinOps Practice Management: Continuously improve FinOps adoption and organizational alignment.

The “Cloud Usage and Cost Optimization” domain is particularly important for the purposes of the Advisor Well-Architected assessment because it focuses on ensuring efficient use of cloud resources and cost efficiency. This aligns with WAF’s Cost Optimization pillar, which emphasizes designing cloud solutions that maximize value while minimizing cost. Both frameworks advocate continuous monitoring and adjustment to achieve optimal financial and operational efficiency.

How do I use the Advisor Well-Architected assessment?

Running a WAF assessment in Azure Advisor is a simple and intuitive process.

1. Please log in azure Select a portal torture On any page.
2. Select a new evaluation on the Evaluation page

3. Select the subscription, workload (optional property), assessment type, and enter an assessment name. Select Next.

4. Select Create in the Review + Create step. This will redirect you to the MS Learn platform where you can complete the assessment. Reference Using the Well-Architected Framework Assessment in Azure Advisor See our detailed step-by-step guide.

View and manage recommendations:

1. Go to Advisor -> Assessments
2. Select the name of an assessment in Completed status from the list for which you would like to view recommendations.
3. A list of recommendations is displayed for users to view and take action on.

Take the next step. Start your WAF evaluation today.

Azure Advisor’s Well-structured evaluation A powerful tool to improve your Azure environment in terms of performance, reliability, security, cost, and operations, in line with the principles of FinOps accountability and cost efficiency. By proactively identifying and addressing areas of improvement, you can improve your cloud infrastructure and drive your business into the future.

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