Now that we have put everything together, let's look at some best practices and tips to make your life easier in Azure. In this chapter, we will cover development practices for dashboards and monitoring.
I am going to cover as many best practices as I have learned, with my focus on the most commonly used resources in Azure. I am not going to cover everything, but provide some insight into what I have learned. As we plan for Azure, we need to keep in mind the three basic stages of experimentation, migration, and transformation. To review what these are, let's look at them individually:
- Experimentation is what we build, how we develop it, how we test it, how we deploy it, and how we monitor and maintain it. Experimentation is constrained by the boundaries of your operations and development personnel. The main goals are to go fast, push boundaries, make data-driven decisions, simplify, and communicate.
- Migration is the process of moving on-premises resources to Azure workloads.
- Transformation is the process of maximizing applications for Azure.
There are, of course, some general things you should and shouldn't do in Azure, so let's start there first:
- First and foremost, create a cloud strategy or plan around your vision.
- Always keep it simple; complexity creates issues that can be difficult to manage in Azure.
- The more infrastructure you delegate, the better, so choose IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, or a combination.
- Have some best practices and/or architectural guidelines on hang to assist you in your journey.
- Do not try to apply on-premises architectural behaviors to cloud solutions as do not apply.