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Learn about how Power Platform supports you in building highly reliable workloads.
What is a mission critical workload?
The term workload describes a set of application resources, data, and supporting infrastructure that work together to deliver desired business outcomes. A workload comprises application and technology components, such as a Power Platform solution, as well as behavioral, development, and operational processes. Learn more in Power Platform Well-Architected workloads.
A mission-critical workload refers to a workload that is essential for the continuous operation of a business or organization. These workloads must be highly reliable, always available, and resilient to failures.
Consider these key factors when designing and implementing a mission-critical workload:
Reliability and availability: Design the workload to handle failures and stay operational by implementing redundancy and failover mechanisms for continuous availability.
Security: Security for mission-critical workloads involves protecting data integrity, confidentiality, and availability, often using a zero-trust security approach.
Performance: The workload must meet performance requirements under various conditions and handle peak loads without degradation.
Operational Excellence: Continuous monitoring, logging, and alerting are essential to detect and respond to issues promptly. Operational Excellence also includes regular updates and maintenance to keep the system secure and efficient.
What are the differences between a productivity workload and a mission-critical workload?
In IT and business operations, understanding the difference between productivity and mission-critical workloads helps you plan resource allocation effectively. Productivity workloads typically include routine tasks and processes that improve efficiency and performance, like data entry, email communication, and standard software applications. Mission-critical workloads are essential to an organization's core functions, where disruptions can cause significant operational, financial, or reputational harm. Examples include financial transaction processing, healthcare management systems, and emergency response coordination. Clearly differentiate between these two types of workloads and plan your resources and processes accordingly.
| Productivity workload | Mission-critical workload |
|---|---|
| Built ad-hoc | Built to last |
| Built by one | Built and maintained by a team |
| Supports non-critical processes | Support business critical processes |
| No tests | Automated tests |
| Development in production | Exercises application lifecycle management |
| Users monitor quality | Monitored to improve |
| Improved in reaction to user complaints | Improved with recommendations |
| Short lifecycle | Long lifecycle |
What are the common challenges?
Power Platform simplifies the deployment and management of solutions. However, building highly reliable mission-critical workloads on the platform presents several challenges:
- Creating a reliable application at scale is complex. It demands deep platform knowledge to choose the right technologies and configure them optimally for comprehensive functionality.
- In any complex distributed system, failures are inevitable. Solutions must be architected to handle failures with correlated or cascading impacts.
- Operationalizing mission-critical workloads necessitates a high level of engineering rigor, maturity throughout the entire engineering lifecycle, and the ability to learn from failures.
Power Platform Well-Architected guidance
Learn how to drive architectural excellence by reviewing the guidance in Power Platform Well-Architected:
- Reliability recommendations help you evaluate the reliability, resiliency, and failure recovery strategies in your architecture design.
- Security recommendations help you protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and systems. How a workload mitigates security threats significantly affects overall reliability.
- Operational Excellence recommendations help you ensure workload quality through standardized processes and team cohesion. How a workload is able to respond to operational issues has a direct impact on application availability.
- Performance Efficiency recommendations help you design your workload so that it can grow and meet your workload usage demand. Availability isn't just about uptime; it's about maintaining consistent application service and performance relative to a known healthy state.
- Experience Optimization provide meaningful and effective experiences for users of your workload. How a workload informs a user about downtime is key to keeping users informed.
Power Platform and mission-critical workloads
This section describes how Power Platform supports mission-critical workloads.
Increased resiliency with Azure availability zones
Power Platform runs on Microsoft Azure and uses Azure availability zones. Your applications and associated resources are stored in a container called an environment, which is hosted in a region of your choice.
Environments designated for production workloads are replicated synchronously across at least two (and typically three) physically separated Azure zones within the selected region. These zones are independent datacenters with separate power, networking, and cooling, ensuring zero data loss and rapid failover (recovery time objective or RTO < 5 minutes) in the event of failure. This means that if one availability zone experiences a failure (for example, due to a network outage, power disruption, or environmental disaster), customer traffic is automatically redirected to the other zones with minimal service disruption. Your applications and resources won't experience an outage because Power Platform continuously ensures seamless failover and uninterrupted performance.
Regular backup of environments
Environments that have a database are automatically backed up and can be restored to any selected system backup in the last seven days. These backups include all the data, configurations, and customizations within the environment. In addition to automatic backups, administrators can also create manual backups at any time. Manual backups are useful before making significant changes or updates to the environment.
You can extend the backup retention period from seven to 28 days by making an environment a Managed Environment. Learn more in Back up and restore environments.