Trade-offs of cost versus security, performance, and reliability

When you architect the solution for Azure, consider trade-offs between cost and other aspects of design. To achieve the optimal cost, you must ask the business what is most important for the workload. Is it the lowest cost, no downtime, or high throughput? If you decide to go with the lowest cost, then the workload will not have multi-region high availability, nor can it have the best security controls against threats. And these are the risks you need to communicate to the business. As a rule of thumb, an optimal design doesn’t equate to a low-cost design.

Cost versus security

Workload security is the most important aspect of hosting your code in the cloud. By nature, the public cloud is accessible over the internet, and securing your application requires the use of various services that then increase the cost of the solution.

For example, you are hosting your public-facing web applications to track an...