Applying WAF Patterns to Real Architectures
Redesign a monolithic Azure architecture to satisfy WAF requirements for each pillar, documenting the trade-offs between cost, complexity, and resilience.
Architecture Review as a Practice
Applying WAF patterns to real architectures is not a theoretical exercise — it requires evaluating each design decision against the five pillars and making informed trade-offs. A common starting point is the architecture diagram: trace the path of a user request through every component and ask, for each hop, what happens if this component fails, what it costs, and how it is secured.
Evaluating a Monolithic Architecture
Consider a traditional monolithic web application: a single VM running a web server and database together behind a public IP. Against WAF pillars this scores poorly on all five: no redundancy (reliability), database on same host as web tier (security), always-on VM regardless of traffic (cost), no CI/CD (operational excellence), and vertical scaling only (performance efficiency).
All lessons in this course
- The Five Pillars Explained
- Running an Azure Well-Architected Review
- Azure Advisor
- Applying WAF Patterns to Real Architectures