Mission-Critical Applications on Microsoft Azure

Oh no! Not another buzzword! (Or is it a term? Is buzzterm a word?)

What exactly is a mission-critical application or workload?

Well, it means you're building an app on Azure. And a workload is just a bunch of services, technologies, and resources that support a unified business goal or solution, that meets your needs. You'll usually string together many services, APIs, and data to get the final functionality you're after. Some people might call this a solution instead. Just for clarity, an architecture is when we really dig into how we put together the given solution.

And then what do we mean with the term mission critical? It's basically a business requirement where you need your solution to be highly available, reliable, and performant, or else it's going to have a significant cost to your business, whether it's financial or related to the success of your business (such as safety and overall reputation). For example, if you need five 9s in your business (99.999% uptime), then you're likely looking at a mission-critical and business-critical application (or solution/workload).

Read more of the high-level stuff here:

• Mission-critical workloads - Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework

How do you design a mission-critical workload?

Take a look at these four steps for designing your workload:

• 1—Design for business requirements
• 2—Refer to the mission-critical implementations
• 3—Evaluate the design areas using the design principles
• 4—Deploy a sandbox application environment

Read more:

• Design methodology for mission-critical workloads
• Design principles of a mission-critical workload
• Cross-cutting concerns of a mission-critical workload

But wait, there's more!

See Design areas for a mission-critical workload on Azure. We broke down these design areas to really dig into the specifics for you:

Leave a comment if you have any questions or comments (I guess they're called comments for a reason).

This content comes from our mission-critical team, who built this solution: Azure/Mission-Critical. Azure Mission-Critical is an open-source project that provides a prescriptive architectural approach to building highly reliable cloud-native applications on Microsoft Azure for mission-critical workloads. More specifically, this repository contains everything required to understand and implement an "always on" application on Microsoft Azure.

For my personal recommendations...

Here are some other great content sets that you should totally check out:

• Architecting multitenant solutions on Azure
• Architecture for startups
• Solutions across Microsoft platforms:
  • Azure and Power Platform scenarios
  • Azure and Microsoft 365 scenarios
  • Azure and Dynamics 365 scenarios
  • Azure and on-premises Microsoft servers
• Third-party scenarios:
  • Apache scenarios on Azure
  • Open-source scenarios on Azure
  • Microsoft partner and third-party scenarios on Azure

- Ed

You can also check out some of my books at http://aka.ms/MegTheMechanicalEngineer (children's book, with Sailaja and Jesssica) and http://aka.ms/Mapbook (Azure Architecture Maps, with Stephane). You'll find all 20 of my books at http://aka.ms/EdPrice. Leave a review or comment to let me know what you think of those projects as well. Thanks!