Course Overview
The Escape Room is an interactive event designed for intermediate and advanced Microsoft Azure users. Attendees will form teams of four and compete to resolve specific challenges related to the event's topic. Each topic represents a real-world scenario that guides the learning experience and sharpens cloud skills. Participants will use GitHub Copilot, the Azure portal, and the CLI to complete challenge tasks. Scoring is automated via an external simulator, and the leaderboard is visible at all times. The winner is determined by the number of points scored during the event's official duration.
This Escape Room experience focuses on modernizing applications by migrating from traditional, on-premises systems to the cloud. By leveraging the power of AI through GitHub Copilot, participants will dive into the world of NoSQL databases and learn to refactor applications and data models to scale their applications. This developer-focused gamified experience will challenge teams to optimize application performance and achieve global reach.
Course Content
Gamification Storyline
StyleVerse, a trendy fashion e-commerce startup, is at a critical crossroads. While their initial viral success propelled rapid growth, their underlying technology, built on a creaky SQL database affectionately nicknamed "Rusty," is now a major liability. Rusty struggles to handle the daily influx of user data, resulting in performance bottlenecks and customer frustration. With investors pushing for global expansion, StyleVerse's CTO knows that Rusty simply can't scale. The challenge is clear: modernize the application and data infrastructure before their competitors, who are already circling, capitalize on their technical weaknesses.
Your team of developers, StyleVerse's last line of defense, must refactor the application, migrate to Cosmos DB, and achieve global scalability – a high-stakes gamble to transform StyleVerse into a global fashion powerhouse. Can you deliver on the promise of global domination, or will StyleVerse become another cautionary tale of a startup that couldn't keep up with its own success?
Scoring Simulator
The scoring simulator is the system responsible for the gamified experience. It monitors the deployed resources, configuration, and data and can send probing requests to REST endpoints, relational and non-relational databases, and other services. The workflow and scoring are configured and adapted depending on the topic and challenge scenario.
Evaluation Criteria
The scoring, in general, will be based on two main criteria:
- 1. Deployment and Configuration: The more tasks each team completes, the more points they earn. The effectiveness of each configuration in terms of cost and performance improvement will also be assessed.
- 2. Speed and Efficiency: Teams will earn additional points for completing tasks swiftly and effectively. The faster the correct setup is finalized, the more successful responses the simulator receives, resulting in more points awarded to the team.
Who should attend
Developers, Software Engineers, Developer Leads
Course Objectives
Learning Outcomes
- Leverage the power of GitHub Copilot to rapidly modernize your applications
- Understand the benefits of NoSQL databases and Azure Cosmos DB.
- Deploy and configure applications on Azure App Services.
- Translate relational data models to NoSQL schema.
- Refactor application code to interact with Cosmos DB.
- Optimize Cosmos DB performance for scalability and global distribution.
- Implement data migration strategies from SQL to Cosmos DB.
Outline: AI-Powered Developer Escape Room Hack: App Modernization (DVESCP)
Phases
- Phase 1: The “Rusty” Rescue Mission
Teams will begin by deploying the existing "Legacy Monolith" application – a web API serving a frontend, to a single Azure App Service instance connected to an Azure SQL database. This establishes the baseline performance and first environment in the cloud. This challenge focuses on mastering Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep) to get the initial legacy stack running live in the East US region.
- Phase 2: The Relational Jailbreak
Participants will act as data architects to analyze the rigid SQL schema and redesign it to support the flexible capabilities of Azure Cosmos DB. Teams must map relational tables, specifically the high-traffic shopping cart, into efficient JSON documents and migrate the data. This challenge emphasizes the critical shift from relational modeling to NoSQL thinking, requiring teams to define partition keys that will support future scale.
- Phase 3: Rewiring the Mainframe
Teams will dive into the application code to replace the legacy relational data access layer with the Azure Cosmos DB SDK. Participants must refactor the application logic to interact seamlessly with the new NoSQL backend, implementing efficient point reads and query operations. This challenge focuses on the practical application of the SDK and ensuring the application functions correctly with its new "brain" before any scaling occurs.
- Phase 4: Around the World in 80ms
To defeat the speed of light, teams will transform the single-region application into a globally distributed "Global Mesh" architecture. Participants must configure Cosmos DB to replicate data physically to Europe and Asia, while simultaneously deploying new App Service instances in those same regions behind Azure Front Door. This challenge requires implementing advanced local read patterns in the code, ensuring that a user in Tokyo automatically hits the Tokyo app instance and reads from the Tokyo database replica to achieve sub-50ms latency.
- Phase 5: The Influencer Apocalypse
Teams will face a simulated viral event where traffic spikes by 10,000%. Participants must demonstrate their system's resilience by configuring Autoscale on their Cosmos DB containers and App Service plans to handle the load without crashing. This challenge validates the entire architecture by testing whether the selected partition keys and scaling settings can sustain high throughput under extreme pressure while maintaining the low latency achieved in the previous phase.