Azure Local Well-Architected Framework and Review Assessment

As organizations increasingly adopt Azure Local to run modern and traditional applications across on-premises and edge environments, ensuring a robust and scalable architecture becomes essential. That’s where the Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment comes in—a powerful tool designed to help you evaluate and improve your Azure Local deployments.

What is Azure Local?

Azure Local extends Azure services to customer-owned infrastructure, enabling local execution of Windows and Linux VMs, Azure Virtual Desktop, and containerized workloads via Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Arc. It supports additional Azure Arc-enabled services like Azure Container Apps and Azure Machine Learning AKS compute targets, while maintaining consistent cloud management and meeting data sovereignty and compliance requirements.

If you want to learn more about Azure Local also check out my Azure Local Overview video.

Introducing the Well-Architected Review Assessment

Neil Bird (Principal Program Manager at Microsoft), just announced the newly available Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment. The Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment is based on the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF), which provides structured guidance across five key pillars:

• Reliability
• Security
• Cost Optimization
• Operational Excellence
• Performance Efficiency

By answering a series of Yes/No questions, you can assess your architecture’s maturity and receive a tailored risk score. Each question reflects a best practice or feature—if implemented, you mark “Yes”; if not, you leave it blank. The results include actionable guidance and links to resources that help you address gaps and improve your deployment.

When to Use the Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment

You can complete the assessment at any stage of your Azure Local project. However, doing it early—during design or pre-deployment—can help you avoid costly rework and ensure your architecture is aligned with best practices from the start.

Watch the Demo

To see how the assessment works in practice, check out our video walkthrough. The demo showcases the user experience of answering the assessment questions and interpreting the results.

📺Watch the video: Azure Local Well-Architected Framework and Assessment 📃📏

Additional Architecture Resources

To further support your Azure Local journey, explore these reference architectures and best practices:

• Azure Local baseline reference architecture
• Azure Local storage switchless architecture
• AKS Baseline Architecture for Azure Local
• Deploy and Operate Apps with AKS Enabled by Azure Arc on Azure Local
• Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Local
• Architecture Best Practices for Azure Local

Summary

The Azure Local Well-Architected Review Assessment is a valuable resource for organizations looking to optimize their hybrid cloud deployments. By aligning with the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, teams can identify gaps, improve reliability and performance, and ensure compliance and cost-efficiency. Whether you’re just starting your Azure Local journey or refining an existing deployment, this assessment—along with the supporting architecture resources—provides the guidance needed to build a resilient and future-ready infrastructure.