This is a continuation of an article that describes operational considerations for hosting solutions on Azure public cloud.

There are several references to best practices throughout the series of articles we wrote from the documentation for the Azure Public Cloud. The previous article focused on the antipatterns to avoid, specifically the cloud readiness antipatterns. This one talks about design principles and advanced operations.

A management baseline provides a minimum level of business commitment for all supported workloads. It includes a standard business commitment to minimize business interruptions and accelerate recovery if service is interrupted. Usually it includes inventory and visibility, operational compliance, and protection and recovery – all of which provide streamlined operational management. It does not apply to mission critical workloads, but it covers 80% of the less critical workloads.

There are a few ways to go beyond the management baseline which includes enhanced baseline, platform specialization, and workload specialization.

The enhanced management baseline uses cloud-native tools to improve uptime and decrease recovery times. It significantly reduces cost and implementation time.

The management specialization are aspects of workload and platform operations which require changes to design and architecture principles, and these could take time and result in increased operating expenses. The enhanced management baseline applies broadly to many workloads while this one applies specifically to certain cases. There are two areas of specialization: 1) the platform specialization and 2) workload specializations. The former resolves key pain points in the platform and distributes the investments across multiple workloads and the latter involves ongoing operations of a specific mission-critical workload.

In addition to these management baselines, there are a few steps that apply to each specialization process. These include improved system design, automated remediation, scaled solution, and continuous improvement. Improved system design is the most effective approach among these, and it applies universally to most operations of any platform. It increases stability and decreases impact from changes in business operations. Both the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-architected framework provide guiding tenets for improving the quality of a platform or a specific workload with the five pillars of architecture excellence which include cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security.

Business interruptions cause technical debt and if it cannot be automatically resolved, automated remediation is an alternative. Use of Azure automation and Azure Monitor can detect trends and provide automated remediation which is the most common approach. Similarly, a service catalog can list applications that can be deployed for internal consumption. A platform can then maximize adoption and minimize maintenance overhead with the use of the service catalog.