Summary

In this chapter, we started with an introduction to the WAF, and we discussed the five pillars of the WAF. The pillars are cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security. We briefly covered the concepts and principles of these pillars. Adopting the best practices and recommendations provided by these pillars of the WAF will help you to improve the quality of your Azure workloads.

Then, we discussed the elements of the WAF; recommendations and best practices of the WAF are derived from these elements. In simple words, elements act as the data source for the WAF. There are six elements of the WAF: Azure Well-Architected Review, Azure Advisor, documentation, partners, support, and service offers, reference architecture, and design principles. Understanding these elements will help you learn the best practices that are used to build the WAF. Design patterns and some recommendations for design principles are not included in this chapter as they are out of the scope of the book; nevertheless, you can always refer to the shared links to learn more.

As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, there are multiple frameworks for the cloud. In the next chapter, we will understand the difference between the CAF and WAF. Readers often tend to get confused between these frameworks, so let’s take deep dive into the CAF versus the WAF.