Achieve Reliability for your Apps and Workloads with Microsoft Azure

The cloud emerges as a major disruptive force in shaping the nature of business and plays a major opportunity and allowing dramatic global growth. The cloud brings breakthrough change, and thus represents (for incumbents) a major opportunity and plays a determining role notably in this very specific moment of time we all live. An increasing number of people thus recognize the benefits of locating (and possibly modernizing) existing applications or building new ones in the public cloud as part of their (ongoing) digital transformation or simply, as a mean to an end, as part of the resiliency plan of their organization with the current Coronavirus pandemic. One of the various objectives or the requirements that pave such a journey to the cloud is the reliability of the considered organizations’ (business-critical) applications and workloads, whatever they are and the underlying technology is, e.g. virtual machines (VM), containers and cloud-native related trends, etc. Reliability is defined as dependability and performing consistently well, and we know uptime is extremely critical to our customer's success. However, the way that you make systems ‘reliable’ is different in the public cloud, compared to on-premises. This whitepaper discusses how reliability can be achieved in the cloud, an ever-changing, constantly evolving environment by nature. This is a complete different model compared to what IT generally delivered for reliability, which was to gold plate the hardware, deploy software, and leave things alone when they were working, and, in other words, where you can achieve greater availability by avoiding change. Just like avoiding change is impossible in the public cloud, avoiding failure is not a reasonable goal – we all need to plan to respond to failure gracefully: it’s all about resiliency. Resiliency is not about avoiding failures but responding to and survive failure(s) in a way that avoids downtime and data loss. This whitepaper covers: