AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solution

Describe how DevOps uses vertical teams to group user interface and data and service layers for modules like email, voice, and television, enabling collaboration and scalable delivery.

Explore Azure DevOps tools—Boards, Pipelines, Repos, Artifacts, and Test Plans—and compare with GitHub offerings like Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and Packages, including security and licensing considerations.

Plan agile with GitHub projects and Azure boards by linking work items, issues, and pull requests across repositories, customizing views, and planning iterations.

Explore how source control underpins DevOps, enabling versioning, collaboration, and automated build, test, and deployment workflows through infrastructure as code and security policies.

Describe centralized and distributed source control systems, comparing Team Foundation, CVS, Subversion, Perforce with git and mercurial; explain branching, pull requests, and collaborative workflows.

Master agile planning and portfolio management with Azure Boards in Azure DevOps, configuring teams, area paths, iterations, sprints, dashboards, and customized DevOps work item templates.

Explore monorepo and multi-repo structures, compare cloning behavior, and learn change log practices with manual and automated logging using git log and git change log generator.

Explore git branch options like feature branching, forking, and git flow, and how they move code from main to branches, PRs, and staged deployments to dev, test, or prod.

Explore git hooks and how to enforce policies before and after commits using the hooks folder to run checks for code coverage, commit messages, and dependencies.

Foster inner source with a fork-based workflow that lets teams fork and clone trusted repositories, reducing firewall exposure, and easily sync changes via pull requests.

Manage git repositories by handling histories and binaries with shallow clones and git large file storage; purge data with git filter-repo or bfg repo cleaner, and create releases with tags.

Identify technical debt by measuring code quality and complexity, tracking build failures and deployment issues, and addressing sources like missing tests and poor documentation with automated testing and code reviews.

Learn to use git for version control in Azure Repos, including cloning, committing, pushing, branching, tagging, pull requests, work items, and branch policy enforcement in a DevOps workflow.

Explore Azure pipelines and learn to write pipeline instructions in yaml or ui, build, test, and deploy code across dev to production with Azure DevOps, enabling continuous integration and deployment.

Describe how pipelines and concurrency drive build and release flows, including parallel jobs, queuing, and approvals, and compare visual designer versus YAML pipelines for in-repo versioning and future features.

Explore continuous integration by automatically building and testing code on every commit, delivering instant feedback, early bug detection, and automated builds across version control, package management, and CI pipelines.

Implement a pipeline strategy by configuring agents with user defined and system capabilities to gate jobs, enabling multi configuration and multi agent deployments, parallel pipelines, and classic vs YAML options.

Explore how to design and run Azure pipelines, including triggers, variables, stages, jobs, steps, pools, and yaml templates, with multi-repo sources and artifacts.

Learn how to implement continuous integration with GitHub actions, automating build, test, and release for a dotnet eShop on web project with environment variables, secrets, artifacts, and best practices.

Design a container build strategy by explaining container advantages, dockerfiles, multi-stage builds, and deploying containers with Azure services like AKS, container instances, and Azure Container Registry.

Explore configuring agent pools and running YAML pipelines on self-hosted and Microsoft hosted agents in Azure DevOps, including setup, registration, and dotnet restore, build, test, publish.

Automate ci/cd with GitHub actions, import a repo and set up secrets, then build, test, publish, and deploy an Azure web app with environment approvals.

Create a CI/CD pipeline that builds a Docker image, pushes it to Azure Container Registry, and deploys to Azure App Service for containers using a service connection and Bicep templates.

Learn how continuous delivery makes releases repeatable, reliable, and automated by using source control, clear release ownership, and continuous code quality improvements across the build and release pipeline.

Create a release pipeline using YAML or classic, manage artifacts from multiple sources, define stages like dev, QA, and production, and deploy with tasks and parallel release jobs.

Create and reuse task groups as templates for Azure deployment and app service tasks. Define stage-scoped pipeline variables and variable groups, including key vault secrets.

Explore multi-stage YAML deployment strategies, including pre-deployment, deploy, traffic routing, and post-routing steps, with rolling and canary updates for Kubernetes and canary releases in Azure Kubernetes Service.

Learn to control deployments with classic release gates by wiring a CI pipeline and a release pipeline across dev/test/prod environments, with Azure Application Insights alerts to deny or permit releases.

Implement blue-green deployment with staging green environments and zero-downtime swapping, and use feature toggles to enable or disable features for testing variants before production.

Implement canary releases and dark launching with Azure traffic manager to route a portion of users to a version, while others stay on production, using feature toggling for access.

Explore A/B testing and progressive exposure deployment to compare variants, measure user conversion, and roll out the best performing version through canary, beta, and production rings.

Configure a yaml-based pipeline in Azure DevOps to build and deploy a web app, including creating Azure resources and managing artifacts and environment approvals.

Set up and run unit, integration, and functional tests in a CI pipeline for the eShop on web project using dotnet test and a YAML pipeline.

Explore integrating Azure Key Vault with Azure DevOps to securely pull container registry credentials into pipelines via a linked variable group and secrets.

Learn to enable dynamic configuration and feature flags with Azure App Configuration, updating features without redeploying code. Wire the eShop on web app with a managed identity and feature flags.

Create azure resources efficiently with arm templates by using json, parameters, variables, and functions to deploy resources consistently, with dependencies, linked templates, incremental deployment, and key vault integration.

Explore how bicep wraps ARM templates to simplify deployments, converting instructions into ARM templates and running Azure API calls, while learning parameters, variables, resources, modules, and outputs.

Explore Azure automation with DevOps to automate tasks using runbooks in PowerShell or Python. Integrate with Git or Azure DevOps, manage VMs and backups, and trigger via webhooks.

Design and deploy Azure resources with Bicep templates, modularize deployments, and nest templates in a YAML pipeline to provision a VM and storage account in a DevOps workflow.

Embrace secure DevOps as a shared responsibility by integrating security across all layers, auditing, threat detection, and vulnerability scanning within the CI/CD pipeline.

Learn how software composition analysis protects your code by scanning package dependencies and open source components for security, vulnerabilities, and licenses within DevOps pipelines using Mend Bolt and related tools.

Examine static analyzers that run in builds to surface code quality issues, vulnerabilities, and duplicates using Sonar Cloud and Sonar Cube, and explore CodeQL on GitHub for insights in DevOps.

Leverage the Open Web Application Security Project and dynamic analyzers like ZAP to baseline, scan, and perform penetration testing in your DevOps pipeline, generating actionable vulnerability reports.

Secure DevOps pipelines and infrastructure by implementing identity protection, multi-factor authentication, just-in-time access, RBAC, and Key Vault integration, while using Azure Defender and policy compliance to monitor threats.

Explore package management in Azure DevOps, including public and private feeds (Azure Artifacts) for NuGet, npm, Python, Maven, and Docker. Learn to search, install, publish, and manage packages.

Understand how to migrate and consolidate artifacts across sources, secure feeds with Azure Artifacts, and apply fine-grained permissions to readers, collaborators, and owners.

Implement a robust versioning strategy for packages with immutable versions, semantic versioning, and local, pre-release, and release views, promoting between views and automating publishing via Git and DevOps.

Explore how GitHub packages host and manage npm, Maven, Gradle, NuGet, Ruby gems, and more, with publishing, authentication, and role-based access controls.

Implement continuous monitoring with Azure Monitor and Application Insights, collecting metrics and logs to visualize dashboards, set alerts, and enable auto-scaling across apps and data.

Monitor your environment with azure dashboards and application insights, using predesigned dashboards, container insights, and Power BI visuals to track requests, memory, CPU, and compliance issues.

Share knowledge within teams by documenting and publishing code, diagrams (including mermaid diagrams), and workflows in the Azure DevOps project wiki, ensuring onboarding, continuity, and traceable references for future work.

Learn to deploy app services, create a DevOps pipeline, and run Azure load testing with virtual users and requests per second; monitor performance and analyze results.

Publish code as a wiki and create project wikis in Azure DevOps to share team knowledge, using markdown, mermaid diagrams, and images with revision history and page linking.