Restore and Validate an Azure Workload After Failure

Table of Contents

1. Challenge

   Establish the workload's expected and failed states

   1. Verify the workload's expected application response and health response.
   2. Induce the contained workload failure.
   3. Confirm that the intended application path and health response are no longer available
2. Challenge

   Identify the available recovery source

   1. Review the recovery artifact available for the affected workload.
   2. Confirm that the snapshot represents a known-good state of the affected VM.
   3. Determine that the snapshot can be used to recover the failed workload.
3. Challenge

   Recover the workload from the known-good snapshot

   1. Create a recoverable OS disk from the selected snapshot.
   2. Replace the affected VM's OS disk with the recovered disk.
   3. Return the VM to a running state after the recovery operation.
4. Challenge

   Validate the recovered workload

   1. Confirm that the recovered VM reaches its expected operational state.
   2. Verify that the workload again serves its intended application path.
   3. Verify that the workload again produces its expected health response.
5. Challenge

   Capture and hand off recovery evidence

   1. Review the recorded Azure operations associated with the failure and recovery.
   2. Capture the recovery timeline, recovery action, and validation results.
   3. Summarize the evidence required for an incident record or recovery runbook update.