AZ-400 Designing & Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions

Explore Azure DevOps process models—basic, agile, scrum, and CMMi—alongside epics, features, stories, and tasks, with Kanban boards, metrics, acceptance tests, and product backlog items.

Create a new Azure DevOps project, select Agile as the work item process, and import a predefined template to define epics, features, stories, and tasks for end-to-end planning.

Learn how to use work tracking visuals from process models in DevOps to monitor item status, communicate progress to stakeholders, and adjust timelines with charts, burn down/up, CFDs, and dashboards.

Learn to set up dashboards in Azure DevOps, add a chart widget for work items, create shared queries for new and non-new tasks, and manage backlog assignments.

Link work items with branches, commits, and pull requests to development activities, related work, and deployments to track how code changes map to tasks across development, testing, staging, and production.

Integrate GitHub with Azure DevOps to track work items alongside code, link pull requests to work items, display status badges, and enable CI/CD pipelines.

demonstrates linking Azure Boards with a GitHub repository to track work items through branches, commits, and pull requests, updating dashboards in real time.

Leverage wikis and release notes to share project information, enable collaboration, and communicate changes, using markdown, git, semantic versioning, and automated release notes tooling.

Learn the basics of version control with git, including commits, repositories, branches, and pull requests, and how local and remote repos sync to maintain code integrity.

Install git, init a repository, create a readme, add and commit changes, and establish the main branch with a commit hash to enable remote collaboration.

Explore how to use remote repositories and branching with git, push and pull changes, and review via pull requests in GitHub flow for collaboration in Azure DevOps.

Create a new Azure DevOps repository, link it to your local repo, push main, create a feature one branch, commit and push changes, then complete a merge request into main.

Explore Git branching strategies, including GitHub flow and Git flow, with release and hotfix branches, and learn how branching policies and build validation safeguard code quality.

Demonstrate how Azure DevOps enforces branch policies on pull requests, including required linked work items, creating feature branches, and completing merges to reflect policy-driven workflows.

Explore repo and organization permissions, role-based access, and authentication methods (Pat and ssh) for Azure DevOps and GitHub, plus how to recover deleted content and manage pipelines stored as yaml.

Learn to manage Azure DevOps repos by configuring organization and project permissions, authenticating with personal access tokens or SSH keys, and performing git tasks from pull requests to reverts.

Discover advanced git options and azure devops workflows with service hooks and webhooks in a pub-sub model. Leverage gitignore, lfs, scalar, fs monitor, and sparse checkouts to optimize large repositories.

Explore how Azure DevOps pipelines transform code into tested, deployed artifacts through CI and CD, using classic and YAML pipelines with triggers, stages, agents, and tasks.

Learn how Azure DevOps pipelines work, create and edit classic and YAML pipelines, choose agent pools, add tasks, and configure triggers.

Explore how pipeline agents run tasks on Windows, Linux, or Mac, including Microsoft hosted, self-hosted, and Azure VM scale set options, and how service connections enable secure cross-platform access.

Set up and configure self-hosted and Microsoft hosted agent pools, install and run a Linux agent, and validate pipelines by running yaml on a demo pool.

Define infrastructure as code to provision resources via pipelines, ensuring consistency, security, and rapid deployment; use arm, bicep, terraform, or open tofu with git versioning and tests for azure storage.

Demonstrates infrastructure as code (IAC) using Bicep to deploy resource groups, a VNet, and a VM via an Azure DevOps pipeline with Azure CLI tasks.

Learn how packages and feeds manage dependencies, versions, and delivery in Azure DevOps, including semantic and date-based versioning, universal packages, build artifacts, upstream feeds, and integration with GitHub packages.

Demonstrates creating an Azure Artifacts feed, publishing a Python package with twine via PyPI RC file, and using a pipeline with variable groups and RBAC views to run it.

Automate software delivery in Azure DevOps by integrating testing across static code analysis, unit, integration, system, and acceptance tests. Use gates, approvals, and multi-stage pipelines to manage deployments.

Demonstrates pipeline automation in Azure DevOps, showing PR build validation with Terraform format checks, branch policies, and release pipelines deploying dev and prod environments with variable files.

Monitor and optimize Azure DevOps pipelines by tracking runs, failures, and test performance; implement parallel tasks, caching, and appropriate agent sizing. Define retention for history, tests, and artifacts.

Analyze pipeline analytics to track pass rate and duration, and build dashboards to visualize history. Optimize tasks, retention, protected branches, flaky tests, and artifact retention.

Explore deployment strategies for live applications in Azure DevOps pipelines, using lifecycle hooks: pre-deploy, deploy, post-route traffic, and failback, to minimize user disruption and enable canary, rolling, and run-once deployments.

Explore how to manage secrets in Azure DevOps pipelines, using service connections, secret management tools, and secure files to protect sensitive information while enabling resource access.

Explore how to secure Azure DevOps pipelines by using service connections to Azure resources, retrieving secrets from Azure key vault or variable groups, and applying approvals and checks for governance.

Learn to monitor Azure resources with service health, resource health, and application performance monitoring using Azure Monitor tools such as Log Analytics, App Insights, Event Hubs, and alerts.

Explore how to monitor and analyze a web app with Application Insights, Log Analytics, and alert rules in Azure, using KQL queries and action groups.

Recap the four high-level topics—processes, version control, pipelines, and security and monitoring—for AZ-400 exam prep. Practice with labs and Learning Path labs to build hands-on devops skills and avoid cramming.