Cloud-native solutions create new business value by building applications or adding features that use cloud capabilities for scalability, resilience, and agility. This guidance provides a structured approach to plan cloud-native development projects that align with business goals and minimize delivery risks.
Planning cloud-native solutions on Azure
- Define business objectives for cloud-native solutions. Start with clear, measurable business goals, identify constraints and success criteria, and validate stakeholder alignment to ensure everyone shares the same expectations from project inception.
- Define requirements for cloud-native solutions. Document functional requirements that tie to business objectives, establish nonfunctional requirements including reliability metrics and security baselines, and control scope by clearly defining what is in-scope versus out-of-scope for the initial release.
- Plan the cloud-native architectures. Explore validated reference architectures from Azure Architecture Center, select appropriate architecture styles based on workload characteristics, apply design best practices and cloud patterns, integrate the Well-Architected Framework’s five pillars into design decisions, plan integrations with existing systems, select appropriate Azure services and service tiers based on requirements, determine regional deployment strategy based on reliability targets, and document architectures with detailed diagrams and design decisions.
- Plan the cloud-native deployment strategy. Establish DevOps practices for deployment automation, plan operational readiness with monitoring and incident response procedures, define development practices that support reliable deployments, use progressive exposure for new workloads starting with pilot groups, plan feature integration using change management processes with appropriate deployment patterns (in-place updates for minor changes, blue-green for major changes), and define ownership and support responsibilities for post-deployment operations.
- Define rollback plan for cloud-native solutions. Create comprehensive rollback procedures to quickly recover from deployment issues and ensure business continuity during release activities.
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