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advanceddisaster-recoverydatabasereliability~15 min5 rounds

Your Primary Region Is Down. Fail Over Now?

The primary region is degraded. A teammate wants to flip DNS to the standby immediately. Defend whether and how you fail over.

the decision you defend

Your primary cloud region is having a major outage and your app is degraded. You have a standby in another region with an async database replica. A teammate says just flip DNS to the standby right now. Do you fail over, and how?

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the situation

Your primary cloud region is in a major outage. The app is timing out and erroring for users. You maintain a warm standby in a second region backed by an asynchronous database replica.

context

The primary is degraded but it is not clear it is fully dead - parts of it may still be reachable and writable. The async replica is some seconds behind. A teammate wants to immediately update DNS to send all traffic to the standby region.

How this challenge works

Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.