Well-Architected lab 2022
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Welcome to the Well-Architected lab. This is a full-day hands-on experience where you will be given a set of challenges to practice the skills you learnt in the Well-Architected Workshop.
In this lab you have to review the architecture of the Contoso Inc. Insurance company and provide a roadmap of recommendations based on the Well-Architected principles.
Agenda
| Title | Time | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Well-Architected Opportunity for Partners | 15 min | |||||||||||||||||
| Well-Architected Framework standardized process | 20 min | |||||||||||||||||
| Break | 15 min | |||||||||||||||||
| Group formation | 10 min | |||||||||||||||||
| Case Study & Lab rest of the day | ||||||||||||||||||
| Build your case |
|
~5h | ||||||||||||||||
| Break | 45 min | |||||||||||||||||
| Teams presentation | 1h | |||||||||||||||||
| Wrap up | 30 min | |||||||||||||||||
| Total: | ~7 h |
Recommendation: 2 hours before the end of the event start preparing your plan.
Case Study
Contoso Inc., is an Insurance Company headquartered in Madrid, provides insurance solutions across Europe.
- Mobile agents located across the continent visit claimants to verify their claims and upload information using the Claims Application.
- Headquarters is in Madrid, Spain with various branch locations.
- Contoso IT group is a classic shop, mainly focused on infrastructure, little automation in operations. They use legacy tools for monitoring, governance, security and deployments.
- The AppDev department’s skill set is dated, predominantly focused on client/server development.
- The organization has an Internet-based claims application they recently deployed into Azure.
- The current design relies on a single SQL Server VM and a single AD VM. Web servers use a load-balancer with TCP probe. Branch offices are connected to Azure using Site-to-Site VPNs with on-site RRAS server.
- Customers have reported reliability issues with the claims application. Failures were correlated to service health issues with the SQL VM.
- Network connectivity issues between the branch offices and the corporate office have occurred intermittently. Every time there is a failure in connectivity, IT team needs to travel to the branch office to troubleshoot on site.
- Disk storage has a heightened level of attention due to a critical server running out of disk space, highlighting gaps in proactive monitoring.
- Recent stability issues with the claims application prompted Contoso to perform a business impact analysis of the application.
- The result is an executive mandate to achieve an SLA of at least 99.95% for the claims application, with RTO of 4 hours and RPO of 6 hours, plus backup of all critical VMs and data.
- The App Dev team is working on a next-generation PaaS-based implementation of the claims application. This is based on a Web App and Azure SQL Database.
- The need to achieve a similar level of resilience as the IaaS-based version, otherwise the business will not agree to migrate to PaaS.
- They need to improve in the application’s time to market as competition in the industry is fierce, they need to implement automation not only for their infrastructure provisioning but also for code deployment. They only have a pipeline for production code deployment.
- As they plan on to moving to PaaS they need to modernize their day-2 operational toolset.
- Security is a big concern as their deployment is internet facing and distributed. They need to design their system securely both in the cloud and branch offices.
- The insurance industry is subject to regulatory standards that they need to align to and provide the mechanisms to enforce compliance guidelines as well as provide auditing information when requested.
- Cost is a concern; they need to optimize their current spending with the IaaS design before planning for the next-gen PaaS deployment.
Customer Architecture
Currently have a single domain controller deployed in West Europe. Connectivity is enabled with a site-to-site VPN gateway.
The claims application has this characteristics:
- Web servers deployed into an availability set
- SQL Server backend (single VM)
- GRS Storage account for object storage
- Azure Bastion is deployed to manage the VM access.
- West Europe
This architecture can be deployed (without the actual application) with the provided template:
⚠️ This deployment may cost over $5000/month, so take care to set limits to your Azure consumption in the subscription and to stop or delete all the deployed resources to avoid high costs.
Additional facts
- Development Environment uses the same size VMs and settings as Production.
- AppDev team only access the environment 9:00-17:00 Monday through Friday.
- All services are deployed in pay-as-you-go mode.
- Platform doesn’t use any WAF but NSG are configured. Claims Apps has not been configured SSL, yet.
- There is no up/down autoscaling set up.
- Any new version of the application is deployed manually. For monitoring they use an agent-based 3rd party tool for the infrastructure metrics, there is no APM. No security or governance solution implemented. They use Azure Backup.
- There is a mismatch of the expected consumption for the deployed resources and what they are being charged. They do not know where those charges may be coming from.
Customer concerns and objections
- After merging with another company, the customer is struggling to provide a good service from their claims app to their mobile agents.
- They need to provide redundancy and resiliency to deliver 99.95% SLA or greater
- Improve the reliability of the VPN
- Guarantee that BCDR and backup solutions are secure and cost effective
- Improve time to market of this app, it is a very competitive scenario and they need to automate deployments and processes
- They started to look into PaaS services but they fear they will be expensive and may not provide the required SLA
- After the merge, they have some disconnected infraestructure and teams, an legacy operational tooling that work in silos
- Need to improve internal structure for cloud operations
- Security and compliance are a big concern, highly regulated industry
- Claims app is exposed to the internet and they need to ensure it is secure
Well-Architected Review
Here starts the exercise you have to do to review the architecture of the Contoso Inc. Insurance company claims application. Follow the links to go through the different steps.
- Review the customer case study (20 min)
- Plan for information collection (15 min)
- Cost optimization (45 min)
- Security (30 min)
- Reliability (~1 h)
- Performance & Efficiency (45 min)
- Operational Excellence (30 min)
- Create a plan (30 min)
Ask The CTO Bot
If you need further information about how the company is using Azure you can ask questions to the CTO Bot:
- Teams: https://aka.ms/CTOBotES
- Telegram: https://telegram.me/contoso_insurance_cto_bot
- Web: https://aka.ms/CTOBotESWeb