Exercise - Use GitHub Copilot plan mode for cloud operations
In this exercise, you take on the role of a cloud architect at a financial services company that must migrate a regulated, on-premises loan origination platform to Azure. Rather than writing infrastructure code directly, you use GitHub Copilot's Plan agent to research the environment, surface gaps in the requirements, reason through architecture trade-offs, and produce a structured plan suitable for a Change Advisory Board review.
Important
To complete this exercise, you need an active GitHub account and a Visual Studio Code environment with GitHub Copilot enabled. If you don't have a GitHub account, you can sign up for a free individual account. GitHub Copilot Free plan users can access Plan mode, but this exercise involves multiple extended planning sessions that can consume a significant portion of the Free plan's monthly chat quota. To avoid interruptions, mid-exercise, a paid GitHub Copilot plan (Pro, Business, or Enterprise) is recommended. For help with enabling GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, see Set up GitHub Copilot in VS Code.
The exercise covers:
- Accessing the Plan agent and observing how it surfaces clarifying questions from an underspecified prompt.
- Clarifying technical, availability, and compliance requirements progressively and tracking how the plan evolves with each new constraint.
- Introducing a hard budget constraint and using the Plan agent to reason through cost versus requirement trade-offs.
- Validating the final architecture against a defined set of business and regulatory requirements.
- Breaking the validated plan into team-assignable workstreams and generating a CAB-ready submission artifact.
- Encoding team standards in a custom instructions file and selecting the appropriate implementation handoff strategy.
When you select the launch exercise button, the browser navigates to a public GitHub page that provides instructions for this exercise.
When you finish the exercise, return here for:
- A quick knowledge check.
- A summary of what you learned during this module.
- A badge for completing this module.
