Operational Excellence in Azure: Keeping the Cloud Running Smoothly
Jeremy Wallace
Microsoft MVP 🏆| MCT🔥| Nerdio NVP | Microsoft Azure Certified Solutions Architect Expert | Principal Cloud Architect 👨💼 | Helping you to understand the Microsoft Cloud! | Deepen your knowledge - Follow me! 😁
Building in the cloud is one thing. Running it every day? That’s where the real work starts.
Operational Excellence in the Azure Well-Architected Framework is all about keeping workloads healthy, automated, and observable. In other words: less firefighting, more smooth sailing. Here’s how I approach it in the real world.
1. Infrastructure as Code + Automation
Manual changes = fragile systems. If you’re still clicking through the portal to build resources, you’re just asking for drift and mistakes.
Instead, define your infra in code (Bicep, ARM, Terraform) and run it through pipelines. Push a change → pipeline validates → Azure updates. You get:
Repeatability: no more “works in dev, not in prod.”
Versioning: infra changes go through code reviews.
Rollbacks: if something breaks, roll back a template.
Treat infra like software. It’s the single biggest step toward stable operations.
Helpful Microsoft Resources
If you want to dive deeper, these official docs are excellent starting points:
2. Monitoring + Alerts That Matter
“You can’t fix what you can’t see.”
Azure Monitor for metrics/logs.
App Insights for response times, exceptions, failed requests.
Log Analytics to stitch it all together with Kusto queries.
The trick isn’t just collecting data—it’s routing alerts to the right people, with the right thresholds. Too noisy, and everyone ignores them. Too lax, and you miss real problems.
Helpful Microsoft Resources
3. Backups, Recovery, and (Yes) Drills
Backups are easy. Restores are where most teams fail.
Use Azure Backup, SQL automated backups, etc.
Test restores. A backup you’ve never restored is just a false sense of security.
Run disaster recovery drills. Pretend a region went down—can you actually fail over to secondary? Document the steps, because nobody wants to Google docs at 3 AM.
Helpful Microsoft Resources
4. DevOps & Safe Deployments
Small, frequent deployments are safer than giant “big bang” releases. Pair CI/CD pipelines with techniques like blue-green or canary deployments (Front Door or Traffic Manager help here).
Run tests, security scans, and compliance checks in the pipeline before code ever hits production. Quality gates save you from late-night outages.
Helpful Microsoft Resources
5. Incident Management + Learning From It
Incidents happen. The win is in how you respond:
Define on-call rotations and runbooks.
Use Azure Service Health to know if it’s you—or Microsoft—having the outage.
Afterward, run blameless post-mortems. If a cert expired, fix the process (Key Vault auto-renew, expiry alerts). If a deployment broke things, add a pipeline check.
Every incident should leave your ops stronger than before.
Helpful Microsoft Resources
Wrap-Up
Operational excellence doesn’t get the spotlight like shiny new services do—but it’s what keeps everything running. Automate what you can, monitor what matters, prepare for failure, and keep improving.
Do those four things consistently, and your Azure ops will be solid, predictable, and a lot less stressful.
Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) | Driving Business Success in Cloud 🚀 | Cloud Architect | Cybersecurity & Automation
3dThis was a great read, Jeremy. One thing I'd add: the human element of operational excellence. All the monitoring in the world doesn't help if your on-call rotation is burned out or your runbooks are written in tech-speak that only the person who wrote them can understand.
Enterprise SaaS | Cloud-Native | AI & Agile Leadership | Consulting | Certified Scrum Master | Technical Program Manager | Mobile Computing
3dThanks for the share, Jeremy. Also, I find taggings really helpful + creation of various deployment envs (test, staging, prod) greatly helps ensuring DB isolation on each. Swapping then from staging to prod feels like a breeze. For backups, the paid subscription for storage allows custom backups and not just the hourly ones - having that tested restoration point after paying a few extra dollars should give one a peace of mind knowing that the restoration is from a well tested point.
Microsoft Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert | Senior Infrastructure Engineer
3dBackups plus restore drills is a great sentiment. Too often teams stop at "we have backups" without validating recovery. I'd add that aligning these practices with clear ownership makes all the difference in sustaining operational excellence. Solid as always Jeremy Wallace.