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HOWTO: Run a DR Cost Drill

Purpose: Execute a cost-aware DR drill that exercises the full failover decision chain, tracks cloud resource consumption, and produces a structured run record.

Difficulty: Advanced

Track: Disaster Recovery Automation

Overview

A DR cost drill is a rehearsed, reviewable operation that combines failover execution with cost guard enforcement. The drill verifies that the full decision chain fires correctly (from probe trigger through decision service evaluation to cloud resource spin-up) and that all cloud resource consumption stays within the declared cost guard policy. The output is a structured run record suitable for a change review or compliance submission.

1. Pre-Drill Checklist

  • Confirm cost guard policy thresholds are set in the decision service config.
  • Verify cloud billing export is active for the target environment.
  • Capture baseline resource state before the drill begins.

2. Trigger the Decision Chain

  • Initiate the failover probe via the decision service.
  • Confirm the decision service evaluates the failover gate and logs the decision.
  • Record the trigger timestamp and the initial decision service output.

3. Cloud Resource Tracking

  • Monitor cloud resource creation (Cloud SQL, compute, networking) during the drill.
  • Compare incremental spend against the cost guard threshold at each step.
  • Capture cloud billing snapshot at drill midpoint and completion.

4. Run Record Assembly

  • Collect all supporting records: decision log, resource state snapshots, billing captures.
  • Confirm all decision chain steps are present and correctly sequenced.
  • Produce the drill outcome report with cost delta and guard policy compliance status.

5. Post-Drill Teardown

  • Decommission cloud resources spun up during the drill.
  • Confirm billing delta returns to baseline.
  • Archive the completed run record under <runtime-root>/logs/dr/cost-drill/.

References

License: MIT-0 for code, CC-BY-4.0 for documentation unless otherwise stated.