High Reliability and Predictability

High Reliability

Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function. It's also one of the pillars of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework.

The cloud, by virtue of its decentralized design, naturally supports a reliable and resilient infrastructure. With a decentralized design, the cloud enables you to have resources deployed in regions around the world. With this global scale, even if one region has a catastrophic event other regions are still up and running. You can design your applications to automatically take advantage of this increased reliability. In some cases, your cloud environment itself will automatically shift to a different region for you, with no action needed on your part. You’ll learn more about how Azure leverages global scale to provide reliability later in this series.

High Predictability

Predictability in the cloud lets you move forward with confidence. Predictability can be focused on performance predictability or cost predictability. Both performance and cost predictability are heavily influenced by the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. Deploy a solution that’s built around this framework and you have a solution whose cost and performance are predictable.

Performance

Performance predictability focuses on predicting the resources needed to deliver a positive experience for your customers. Autoscaling, load balancing, and high availability are just some of the cloud concepts that support performance predictability. If you suddenly need more resources, autoscaling can deploy additional resources to meet the demand, and then scale back when the demand drops. Or if the traffic is heavily focused on one area, load balancing will help redirect some of the overloads to less stressed areas.

Cost

Cost predictability is focused on predicting or forecasting the cost of the cloud spend. With the cloud, you can track your resource use in real-time, monitor resources to ensure that you’re using them in the most efficient way, and apply data analytics to find patterns and trends that help better plan resource deployments. By operating in the cloud and using cloud analytics and information, you can predict future costs and adjust your resources as needed. You can even use tools like the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or Pricing Calculator to get an estimate of potential cloud spend.