Northwind Traders case study

What it is

Northwind Traders is a fictional online grocery business used throughout this glossary. It has no Azure account and does not describe a Microsoft reference architecture. It gives a name, people, and a small application to otherwise abstract terms.

The business problem

Customers order groceries through a website. A small application accepts orders, saves them, and sends the warehouse a picking request. Northwind wants the site to remain usable if one datacenter fails, while keeping test experiments away from real customer orders.

The cast

• Maya, platform administrator, sets organization-wide safety rules.
• Luis, application owner, deploys the ordering application.
• Priya, finance lead, needs to see and control production spending.
• The ordering workload is the website, its data store, network, monitoring, and delivery configuration working together.

How to use the example

When an entry says “Northwind,” first identify the boundary it is illustrating. For example, Northwind production subscription is an accounting and access boundary; orders-production resource group is a lifecycle boundary; and zone 1 is a placement choice inside a region. They are not interchangeable containers.

Related

azure-management-hierarchy · management-groups · subscription · resource-group · availability-zones · workload