Production Readiness Checklist

Your organization may have migrated to Azure Cloud for scalability, but taking advantage of the cloud requires adapting your applications. Take this production readiness checklist to find out how well your workloads in Azure are set up for scalability and availability.

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* 1. Are you using Traffic Manager in front of your resources?

Traffic Manager enables you to route traffic across Azure regions and on-prem locations. It increases availability and scalability and reduces latency as you are not limited to a single region for your resources.

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* 2. Have you avoided using a single virtual machine for any role?

In the cloud, you increase scalability and resiliency through scaling out (adding more VMs) instead of scaling up (increasing the power of your VM). Cloud-based architectures are therefore especially susceptible to downtime if a single point of failure exists. Luckily, the Azure Virtual Machine SLA does not make single machines available.

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* 3. Are you using a load balancer in front of your application’s internet-facing VMs?

Load balancers make it possible to spread incoming traffic across an arbitrary number of machines. You can easily add or remove machines from your load balancer, depending on traffic and VM failures.
 

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* 4. Are you using availability sets for your stateless application and web servers?

When your machines are in the same application tier of an availability, your VMs are eligible for the Azure VM SLA. Your machines live in different update domains and fault domains, preventing the risk of single points of failure.

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* 5. Are you using Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) for your stateless application or web servers?

Use VMSS to define how the number of machines in a tier of your application can scale. Without a VMSS, limits on your scalability must be handled manually.

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* 6. Are you using premium storage and separate storage accounts for each of your virtual machines?

It is best practice to use premium storage for your production virtual machines, a separate storage for each virtual machine in small-scale deployments, and re-use storage accounts for multiple machines (while ensuring you are balanced across update domains and application tiers) in large-scale deployments.

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* 7. Are you using either a load balancer or a queue between each tier of your application?

Load balancers make it possible to spread incoming traffic across an arbitrary number of machines. You can easily add or remove machines from your load balancer, depending on traffic and VM failures.

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* 8. Are your SQL databases using active geo-replication?

Configure up to 4 readable, secondary databases in the same or different regions with active geo-location. Secondary databases are available if there’s a service disruption or the primary database cannot be reached.

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* 9. Are you using a cache (Azure Redis Cache) in front of your databases?

Increase your application speed and decrease the load on your database by placing a caching layer in front. This will offload read operations.

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* 10. Do you contact Microsoft Azure Support when you have expect a high scale event?

Azure support allows you to increase your service limits, to plan for high traffic events. It will also connect you with experts who can review your design and help you find the best solution.

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* 11. Are you using a Content Delivery Network (Azure CDN) in front of your web-facing storage blobs and static assets?

A CDN can take some load off your servers by caching your content in CDN POP/edge locations around the world. This decreases latency and server load and increases scalability. It can be included in a strategy for protection against DoS attacks.

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* 12. Can we reach you every now and then? We promise not to overload your inbox.

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* 13. To see your results, please fill out your contact information.

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