Azure Guidance Contains Gems, but Mining Required

• Azure guidance includes materials to help organizations optimize costs, performance, manageability, and development time.
• It is a sprawling set of documentation, solution architectures, patterns, and templates that organizations may find difficult to navigate.
• Organizations should understand the general layout of the materials because it contains helpful and critical advice.

Cloud-based development is a paradigm change from traditional software development and on-premises hosting. Consequently, designing, implementing, managing, and evolving Azure solutions can be difficult, and the breadth of Azure services offerings brings many capabilities with overwhelming alternatives that often overlap.

Microsoft offers guidance (sometimes called the Azure Architecture Center) including documentation, architectures, patterns, templates, and other resources to help teams design cloud solutions. However, the guidance is a conglomeration that has evolved from separate efforts over several years, and it continues to receive additions and updates. It can be difficult to find the appropriate information and easy to miss content that could be helpful and critical for design decisions.