Design your next Azure Infrastructure with Sustainability in mind – Part 2

In my previous blog, we discussed a few scenarios where we apply sustainability best practices to various Azure Resources.

In this blog, we will further explore areas where we can incorporate sustainability best practices, when designing your infrastructure on Azure

Compute

• Virtual Machine: This is one of the areas where we have greater control over the e cloud infrastructure. Here are some best practices for reducing carbon footprint during the design phase
  • DDOS: EnableAzure DDoS Protection Standard, combined with application design best practices to provide enhanced DDoS mitigation features to defend against attacks that flood network and compute resources and to reduce unnecessary spikes in usage and costs
    
• App service: This is one of the areas where we are dependent on Azure’s underlying infrastructure when deploying applications such as PaaS. But still, there are few things we can manage
  
  • CDN: The Azure Content Delivery Network is a global CDN solution that helps minimize latency by storing frequently read static data closer to consumers and reducing the network traversal and server load.
• • Local Cache: Enable Local Cache in Azure App service to reduce the round trips to backend server

Storage

• Azure Storage Access Tiers: Azure offers different access tiers i.e. Hot, Cool and Archive. Infrequently used data should be stored in cold or offline archive storage, using less energy.
•  Time To Live (TTL) in Cosmos DB: With Time to Live or TTL, Azure cosmos DB provides the ability to delete items automatically from a container after a certain time period.
• SQL Azure:
  • Indexes: Use indexes to optimize your SQL server queries and reduce the server usage. Moreover, SQL Azure supports Automatic tuning which constantly monitors your queries and identifies actions that can be taken to improve performance
  • Elastic Pools: Azure SQL Database elastic pools are a simple, cost-effective solution for managing and scaling multiple database, the databases in an elastic pool are on a single server and share a set number of resources at a set price.

Others

• Azure API management:
  • Implement Rate Limiting: This can prevent abusive usage of your API’s and ensure that they remain available for legitimate users, this will help in keeping CPU and other resources in control
  • Caching: Caching can significantly reduce the number of requests made to your backend servers, which can reduce cost, improve performance and keep CPU and other resources usage in control
• Network:  Use network security tools with auto-scaling capabilities, such as Azure Firewall Premium or Web Application Firewall on Application Gateway, to enable right-sizing to meet demand without manual intervention and reduce waste of unnecessary resources.
• Monitor: For each resource, Azure offers dashboard in the portal to self-monitor and implement logs whenever there is spike in errors, CPU usage etc. This will further enable us to further analyse and check the reasons behind CPU spikes if any

These are a few steps where we can keep sustainability in control during the design phase