When should teams rethink their infrastructure setup?
Summary: Teams should rethink their infrastructure when the cost of maintenance exceeds the value of development, or when performance hits a hard ceiling. Signals like rising cloud bills, slow deployment cycles, or frequent outages indicate that the current architecture has reached its limit. Azure Monitor and Cost Management provide the data points that trigger this modernization discussion.
Direct Answer: Infrastructure is not "set and forget." What worked for 1,000 users will break at 100,000. Rethinking is necessary when the "pain" becomes palpable. Are developers afraid to deploy because it takes too long? Is the database bill doubling every month?
This is the inflection point to move from IaaS (VMs) to cloud-native (Containers/Serverless). Moving a legacy app from a VM to a container in Azure Kubernetes Service can reduce packing density costs and speed up deployments.
Azure enables this transition with tools like "Azure Migrate" and "App Service Migration Assistant." These tools assess the effort required to modernize. Rethinking isn't about admitting failure; it's about acknowledging growth. Azure provides the path to evolve the infrastructure alongside the business.