𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝘇𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸
Here are the most important Azure services organized by layer.
𝟭. 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱
Here we have Static Web Apps for Single-Page Applications, and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for edge caching. If you need global routing, you can use Front Door, and here you also get WAF. Entra ID B2C can be used for customer identity.
Most teams start with App Service, and honestly, that's the right call because it handles 80% of the cases that we need.
𝟮. 𝗔𝗣𝗜 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿
API Management is heavy, but if you need versioning, rate limiting, and a developer portal, it's worth the cost. App Gateway in front of internal services. Functions for event-driven compute, Event Hubs, when you're ingesting at scale and need Kafka compatibility. Load Balancer for Layer 4 routing.
𝟯. 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿
Use AKS if your project requires Kubernetes. Container Instances for short-lived jobs, where spinning up a cluster is overkill. Service Bus for reliable queuing between services. Event Grid for reactive, event-driven stuff.
Logic Apps is something people swear by for integration workflows, and I've never quite gotten there myself, but the use case is legitimate.
𝟰. 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿
Most of the real architecture arguments happen here. Cosmos DB is when you need global distribution and multi-model flexibility, but also write-heavy systems. Azure SQL when relational is the right fit and you'd rather not manage your own SQL Server. Cache for Redis in front of either.
Synapse for analytics workloads, Data Lake for raw storage, Stream Analytics when you need real-time processing on incoming event streams.
𝟱. 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆
Entra ID for identity, Key Vault for secrets and certificates. WAF placement depends on whether you're using Front Door or App Gateway. Defender for Cloud across the subscription, Sentinel as the SIEM.
This layer tends to get scoped down when budgets are tight. Then something happens, and you rebuild it properly under pressure.
𝟲. 𝗢𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆
App Insights for application telemetry and distributed tracing. Log Analytics for querying everything. Service Health so you know when Azure itself is having a bad day, which happens more often than the 99.9% SLA suggests. Most teams set this up too late.
𝟳. 𝗖𝗜/𝗖𝗗 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀
Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions. Pick one, use it everywhere, don't mix them across teams. Bicep over ARM, the syntax is dramatically cleaner, and the tooling has caught up. Terraform, if you're multicloud or the team already has it. Container Registry for images close to your AKS clusters.
The projects I've seen with the messiest pipelines are the ones that let different teams pick different tools.
𝟴. 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗶𝗹𝗲𝘀
Blob Storage for unstructured data, Azure Files for SMB shares, Queue Storage for simple message passing. Media Services, if you're doing video processing. Computer Vision, when you need image analysis without building the model yourself.
𝟵. 𝗠𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶-𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴
Virtual Network as the foundation. VPN Gateway for site-to-site, ExpressRoute, when you need private dedicated connectivity with predictable latency, and the cost is justified. Traffic Manager for DNS-based global routing. Private Link to expose services internally without putting them on the public internet.
Most teams don't think about this layer until they're designing for a second region.
What performance issue might this cause?
List<Order> orders = orderRepository.findAll();
for (Order order : orders) {
System.out.println(order.getCustomer().getName());
}
Looks harmless.
What happens when you have 50,000 orders?
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