Challenge Info

45 min · 10 pts · architect · 04-adr-ha-dr-strategy.md

Challenge 4: The Curveball — High Availability & Disaster Recovery

⚡ The Announcement

COACH READS AT 13:30:

"ATTENTION ALL TEAMS! 📣

We've just received urgent news from Nordic Fresh Foods headquarters!

They've signed a major contract with a Danish restaurant chain — Smørrebrød Express — worth €500K annually. The board has convened an emergency session and approved increased infrastructure investment.

Your infrastructure must now support high availability with disaster recovery capabilities!

You have 45 minutes to propose, plan, and deploy the solution! 🚀"

New Business Requirements

Requirement	Value	Business Impact
RTO	≤1 hour	Maximum acceptable downtime
RPO	≤15 minutes	Maximum acceptable data loss
Secondary Region	germanywestcentral	Coverage for broader European market
Budget Increase	+€200/month	Total infrastructure budget now ~€700/month
Timeline	45 minutes	Board needs decision on architecture approach

Your Challenge

You must decide: What level of HA/DR does the business need?

Which Path Are You On?

Your Challenge 4 path depends on Challenge 3 outcome:

Challenge 3 Outcome	Your Challenge 4 Tasks
Deployment succeeded	Design DR strategy → Update Bicep → Deploy DR infrastructure → Update diagram
Partial deployment	Design DR strategy → Update Bicep for what works → Document remaining gaps in ADR → Update diagram
Deployment failed	Design DR strategy → Paper exercise: Write ADR + architecture diagram without deploying

Tip

Paper exercise path: If your Challenge 3 deployment failed, you still earn points by producing a high-quality ADR and updated architecture diagram. Describe what you would deploy, which services need replication, and what your failover strategy would be. No pre-built reference deployment is provided.

Option A: Single-Region HA

• All resources in swedencentral
• Zone-redundant services where available
• Faster failover, lower cost
• Risk: Regional outage affects all services

Option B: Multi-Region DR

• Primary: swedencentral, Secondary: germanywestcentral
• Geo-replication for data
• Higher cost, longer RTO
• Risk: Complexity in failover orchestration

Option C: Multi-Region Active-Active

• Both regions serve traffic simultaneously
• Highest availability, highest cost
• Risk: Data consistency challenges

Your Task: Choose an approach and design it as a parameterized solution.

Required Deliverables

1. Architecture Decision Record (ADR) ⭐ MANDATORY

Create: agent-output/freshconnect/04-adr-ha-dr-strategy.md

Your ADR must document:

Context: Why is this decision needed?

• What changed in the business requirements?
• What are the consequences of not addressing this?

Decision: What approach did you choose and why?

• Single-region HA vs multi-region DR vs active-active?
• Which services need redundancy?
• What's your failover strategy?

Consequences: What are the trade-offs?

• Cost implications (+€200 budget: is it enough?)
• Operational complexity
• RTO/RPO achievability
• Risks and mitigation strategies

Alternatives Considered: What did you reject and why?

• Why not the other options?
• What would make you reconsider?

2. Updated Bicep (Parameterized)

Add a parameter to your main.bicep that enables HA/DR:

Concept:

param haStrategy string = 'single-region' // 'single-region' or 'multi-region'
param primaryLocation string = 'swedencentral'
param secondaryLocation string = 'germanywestcentral'

Questions to Explore:

• How do you prompt the bicep-code agent to add this capability?
• Which modules need to change?
• What resources must exist in both regions?
• How do you handle data replication?

3. Deploy DR Infrastructure ⭐ REQUIRED

After updating your Bicep templates, deploy the DR infrastructure:

# Preview changes first
az deployment group what-if \
  --resource-group rg-freshconnect-dev-swc \
  --template-file main.bicep \
  --parameters main.bicepparam \
  --parameters haStrategy='multi-region'

# Deploy with HA enabled
az deployment group create \
  --resource-group rg-freshconnect-dev-swc \
  --template-file main.bicep \
  --parameters main.bicepparam \
  --parameters haStrategy='multi-region'

Deployment Questions:

• What new resources appear in the What-If output?
• Are there any resources that need to be deployed to the secondary region separately?
• How do you verify that geo-replication is working?

4. Updated Architecture Diagram ⭐ MANDATORY

Use the design agent (with the azure-diagrams skill) to update your architecture diagram showing:

• Primary and secondary region resources
• Geo-replication connections
• Failover paths and traffic routing
• Data synchronization flows

Use the `design` agent to update the FreshConnect architecture diagram
to show HA/DR configuration based on agent-output/freshconnect/04-adr-ha-dr-strategy.md

Save your updated diagram — you'll need it for your Partner Showcase in Challenge 8.

5. Updated Cost Estimate

Consider:

• Does your solution fit in the +€200 budget increase?
• What are the major cost drivers for HA/DR?
• Where could you optimize if over budget?

Success Criteria

Criterion	Points	Paper-exercise path
ADR documented with clear rationale	2	Full points available
HA/DR approach chosen and justified	2	Full points available
Bicep parameterized for HA strategy	2	Score based on written design
DR infrastructure deployed	2	Not available (0 pts)
Updated architecture diagram	2	Full points available
Total	10	Max 8 pts

Note

Teams on the paper-exercise path (Challenge 3 deployment failed) can earn up to 8 of 10 points by producing a high-quality ADR, justified approach, written Bicep design, and updated diagram. The 2 deployment points require actual Azure resources.

Time Management Tips

💡 10 minutes: Architecture Decision Record 💡 15 minutes: Prompt the bicep-code agent and update templates 💡 10 minutes: Deploy DR infrastructure 💡 5 minutes: Update architecture diagram 💡 5 minutes: Verify deployment and update cost estimate

Coaching Approach

This challenge tests your ability to:

• Make informed decisions under time pressure
• Balance business needs with technical constraints
• Document architectural decisions clearly
• Use AI agents effectively with well-crafted prompts

Remember: There's no single "right answer" - the quality of your decision-making process matters more than the specific option you choose.

Note

Final scoring uses the criteria in the scoring rubric, which is the single source of truth for all point values. Scoring rubric available from your facilitator.

Artifact Handoff

Item	Value
Input from	infra/bicep/freshconnect/main.bicep + modules (Challenge 3), or your implementation plan if deployment failed
Your output	agent-output/freshconnect/04-adr-ha-dr-strategy.md, updated Bicep with DR parameters (or paper-exercise ADR + diagram)
Next step	Challenge 5: Load Testing — validate your deployed infrastructure under load