After an in-depth look at the Azure platform in the first four chapters, I started in the last chapter to expand our viewpoint on special architectural aspects that influence our daily work, and thus also the design process for our own Azure solutions.

The first topic we examined was the aspect of availability. Now we will expand this area and also look at the aspect of performance (and again the aspect of scalability).

To be clear, the issues of availability and performance go together; they are, strictly speaking, the two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you are asked how many machines are available and, on the other hand, how strong or powerful these machines are.

The third theme, scalability, is then just a means to an end. How do I get more machines? How can I get more performance from my machine?

We will explore the following topics in detail in this chapter:

• What is performance?
• Service level objectives
• Analyzing and interpreting performance data
• Scaling