AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions exam prep guide.
Valid as of July 2022.
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Exam Blueprint
AZ-400 Exam Blueprint
Study materials
✅DevOps Intro
Exam areas
- plan and implement a structure for the flow of work and feedback cycles
- identify appropriate metrics related to flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time
- integrate pipelines with work item tracking tools, such as Azure DevOps and GitHub
- implement traceability policies decided by development
- integrate a repository with Azure Boards
- communicate actionable information by using custom dashboards in Azure DevOps
- document a project by using tools, such as wikis and process diagrams
- configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation
- automate creation of documentation from Git history
- configure notifications by using webhooks
✅02 - Design and implement source control
Design and implement a source control strategy
- design and implement an authentication strategy
- design a strategy for managing large files, including Git LFS and git-fat
- design a strategy for scaling and optimizing a Git repository, including Scalar and cross-repository sharing
- implement workflow hooks
Plan and implement branching strategies for the source code
- design a branch strategy, including trunk-based, feature branch, and release branch
- design and implement a pull request workflow by using branch policies and branch protections
- implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protections
- integrate GitHub repositories with Azure Pipelines, one of the services in Azure DevOps
- configure permissions in the source control repository
- configure tags to organize the source control repository
- recover data by using Git commands
- purge data from source control
✅03 - Design and implement build and release pipelines
Design and implement pipeline automation
- integrate pipelines with external tools, including dependency scanning, security scanning, and code coverage
- design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance
- design integration of automated tests into a pipeline
- design and implement a comprehensive testing strategy
- implement orchestration of tools, such as GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
Design and implement a package management strategy
- design a package management implementation that uses Azure Artifacts, GitHub Packages, NuGet, and npm
- design and implement package feeds, including upstream sources
- design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning and date-based
- design and implement a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts
Design and implement pipelines
- select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
- design and implement an agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability
- develop and implement pipeline trigger rules
- develop pipelines, including classic and YAML
- design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage
- develop complex pipeline scenarios, such as containerized agents and hybrid
- configure and manage self-hosted agents, including virtual machine (VM) templates and containerization
- create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups
- design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML environments
Design and implement deployments
- design a deployment strategy, including blue/green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, feature flags, and A/B testing
- design a pipeline to ensure reliable order of dependency deployments
- plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using VIP swap, load balancer, and rolling deployments
- design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes
- implement load balancing for deployment, including Azure Traffic Manager and the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service
- implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager
- implement application deployment by using containers, binary, and scripts
Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC)
- recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure
- implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure, including IaC
- define an IaC strategy, including source control and automation of testing and deployment
- design and implement desired state configuration for environments, including Azure Automation State Configuration, Azure Resource Manager, Bicep, and Azure Policy guest configuration
Maintain pipelines
- monitor pipeline health, including failure rate, duration, and flaky tests
- optimize pipelines for cost, time, performance, and reliability
- analyze pipeline load to determine agent configuration and capacity
- design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies
✅04 - Develop a security and compliance plan
- implement and manage service connections
- implement and manage personal access tokens
- implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault, GitHub secrets, and Azure Pipelines secrets
- design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment
- design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information
Automate security and compliance scanning
- automate analysis of source code by using GitHub code scanning, GitHub secrets scanning, pipeline-based scans, and SonarQube
- automate security scanning, including container scanning and OWASP ZAP
- automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using WhiteSource and GitHub Dependency Scanning
✅05 - Implement an instrumentation strategy
- configure and integrate monitoring by using Azure Monitor
- configure and integrate with monitoring tools, such as Azure Monitor and Application Insights
- manage access control to the monitoring platform
- configure alerts for pipeline events
Analyze metrics
- inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights
- inspect application performance indicators
- inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network
- identify and monitor metrics for business value
- analyze usage metrics by using Application Insight
- interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries