Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) Practice Exam

Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) Practice Exam

The AZ-400 certification is tailored for DevOps Engineers—professionals with a background in either software development or infrastructure administration—who possess subject matter expertise in driving the continuous delivery of value within organizations by leveraging people, processes, and products.

Who should consider this Exam?

This certification is ideal for professionals who:

• Are working as DevOps Engineers, Developers, or IT Infrastructure Administrators
• Are responsible for automation, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and DevOps strategies
• Collaborate across development, operations, and security teams
• Have experience in administering and developing solutions on Microsoft Azure
• Are looking to validate their expertise in tools such as Azure DevOps and GitHub
• Want to advance their careers in cloud-based DevOps practices and Agile delivery environments

Role Responsibilities

As an Azure DevOps Engineer, your responsibilities include:

• Delivering Microsoft DevOps solutions that enable:

  • Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)

  • Continuous testing and monitoring

  • Secure deployment and infrastructure as code

  • Continuous feedback and improvement

• Designing and implementing:

  • Workflow automation and orchestration

  • Source control strategies

  • Collaboration and communication frameworks

  • DevOps toolchains and processes

Cross-Functional Collaboration

DevOps Engineers operate within cross-functional teams, working closely with:

• Software Developers
• Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)
• Azure Administrators
• Security Engineers

This collaborative role ensures alignment across development, operations, and security functions to maintain high-quality and scalable software delivery.

Required Skills and Experience

To be successful in this role and certification, candidates should have:

• Hands-on experience in administering and developing in Azure
• Strong proficiency in at least one technical domain (development or administration)
• Experience with implementing solutions using Azure DevOps and GitHub
• Understanding of Agile practices and DevOps culture
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code, configuration management, monitoring, and testing practices

Exam Details

• Format: Multiple-choice questions (expected)
• Time Limit: Estimated to be around 90 minutes
• Languages: English (other languages may be offered later)
• Passing Score: 700

Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Course Outline

The Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) covers the latest exam updates and topics - 

1. Designing and implementing processes and communications (10–15%)

Designing and implementing traceability and flow of work

• Designing and implementing a structure for the flow of work, including GitHub Flow
• Designing and implementing a strategy for feedback cycles, including notifications and issues
• Designing and implementing integration for tracking work, including GitHub projects, Azure Boards, and repositories
• Designing and implementing source, bug, and quality traceability

Designing and implementing appropriate metrics and queries for DevOps

• Designing and implementing a dashboard, including flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time
• Designing and implementing appropriate metrics and queries for project planning
• Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for development
• Designing and implementing appropriate metrics and queries for testing
• Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for security
• Designing and implementing appropriate metrics and queries for delivery
• Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for operations

Configuring collaboration and communication

• Document a project by configuring wikis and process diagrams, including Markdown and Mermaid syntax
• Configuring release documentation, including release notes and API documentation
• Automating creation of documentation from Git history
• Configuring notifications by using webhooks
• Configuring integration between Azure Boards and GitHub repositories
• Configuring integration between GitHub or Azure DevOps and Microsoft Teams

2. Designing and implementing a source control strategy (10–15%)

Planning and implementing branching strategies for the source code

• Designing a branch strategy, including trunk-based, feature branch, and release branch
• Designing and implementing a pull request workflow by using branch policies and branch protections 
• Implementing branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protections

Configuring and managing repositories

• Designing and implementing a strategy for managing large files, including Git Large File Storage (LFS) and git-fat
• Designing a strategy for scaling and optimizing a Git repository, including Scalar and cross-repository sharing
• Configuring permissions in the source control repository 
• Configuring tags to organize the source control repository 
• Recovering data by using Git commands
• Removing specific data from source control

3. Designing and implementing build and release pipelines (50–55%)

Designing and implementing a package management strategy

• Recommending package management tools including GitHub Packages registry and Azure Artifacts
• Designing and implementing package feeds and views for local and upstream packages
• Designing and implementing a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning (SemVer) and date-based (CalVer) 
• Designing and implementing a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts 

Designing and implementing a testing strategy for pipelines

• Designing and implementing quality and release gates, including security and governance
• Designing a comprehensive testing strategy, including local tests, unit tests, integration tests, and load tests
• Implementing tests in a pipeline, including configuring test tasks, configuring test agents, and integration of test results
• Implementing code coverage analysis

Designing and implementing pipelines

• Selecting a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
• Designing and implementing a GitHub runner or Azure DevOps agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability
• Designing and implementing integration between GitHub repositories and Azure Pipelines
• Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules
• Developing pipelines by using YAML
• Designing and implementing a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage pipelines
• Developing and implementing complex pipeline scenarios, such as hybrid pipelines, VM templates, and self-hosted runners or agents
• Creating reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups
• Designing and implementing checks and approvals by using YAML-based environments

Designing and implementing deployments

• Designing a deployment strategy, including blue/green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, feature flags, and A/B testing
• Designing a pipeline to ensure that dependency deployments are reliably ordered
• Planning for minimizing downtime during deployments by using virtual IP address (VIP) swap, load balancing, rolling deployments, and deployment slot usage and swap 
• Designing a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes 
• Designing and implementing a resiliency strategy for deployment
• Implementing feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager 
• Implementing application deployment by using containers, binaries, and scripts 
• Implementing a deployment that includes database tasks

Designing and implementing infrastructure as code (IaC)

• Recommending a configuration management technology for application infrastructure
• Implementing a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure
• Defining an IaC strategy, including source control and automation of testing and deployment
• Designing and implementing desired state configuration for environments, including Azure Automation State Configuration, Azure Resource Manager, Bicep, and Azure Automanage Machine Configuration
• Designing and implementing Azure Deployment Environments for on-demand self-deployment

Maintaining pipelines

• Monitoring pipeline health, including failure rate, duration, and flaky tests 
• Optimizing pipelines for cost, time, performance, and reliability
• Optimizing pipeline concurrency for performance and cost
• Designing and implementing a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies
• Migrating a pipeline from classic to YAML in Azure Pipelines

4. Developing a security and compliance plan (10—15%)

Designing and implementing authentication and authorization methods

• Choosing between Service Principals and Managed Identity (including system-assigned and user-assigned)
• Implementing and managing GitHub authentication, including GitHub Apps, GITHUB_TOKEN, and personal access tokens
• Implementing and managing Azure DevOps service connections and personal access tokens
• Designing and implementing permissions and roles in GitHub
• Designing and implementing permissions and security groups in Azure DevOps
• Recommending appropriate access levels, including stakeholder access in Azure DevOps and outside collaborator access in GitHub
• Configuring projects and teams in Azure DevOps

Designing and implementing a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation

• Implementing and managing secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault
• Implementing and managing secrets in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
• Designing and implementing a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment, including Azure Pipelines secure files
• Designing pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information

Automating security and compliance scanning

• Designing a strategy for security and compliance scanning, including dependency, code, secret, and licensing scanning
• Configuring Microsoft Defender for Cloud DevOps Security
• Configuring GitHub Advanced Security for both GitHub and Azure DevOps
• Integrating GitHub Advanced Security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Automating container scanning, including scanning container images and configuring an action to run CodeQL analysis in a container
• Automating analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Dependabot alerts

5. Implementing an instrumentation strategy (5–10%)

Configuring monitoring for a DevOps environment

• Configuring Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to integrate with DevOps tools
• Configuring collection of telemetry by using Application Insights, VM Insights, Container Insights, Storage Insights, and Network Insights
• Configuring monitoring in GitHub, including enabling insights and creating and configuring charts
• Configuring alerts for events in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines

Analyzing metrics from instrumentation

• Inspecting infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network
• Analyzing metrics by using collected telemetry, including usage and application performance
• Inspecting distributed tracing by using Application Insights
• Interrogating logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries