AZ-400 Designing and Implementing DevOps Certification

The traditional approach starts with budget approval and a high-level plan, forms a project team, and proceeds through requirements, design, coding, and testing before delivery, contrasting with an agile approach.

Learn how to add tasks to a user story within backlogs and boards, linking tasks to stories and epics to manage backlog work items efficiently.

Create and manage sprints by moving backlog items into iterations, assigning user stories and tasks, and planning two-week work cycles in Azure Boards.

Explore how to use dashboards in Azure Boards to visualize project data with widgets and charts, track remaining work, cycle time, lead time, and velocity across sprints.

Explore Azure Boards queries to filter work items by type, state, and priority, save and run queries, and visualize results with charts.

Discover how Azure DevOps dashboard permissions govern who can view, create, edit, and delete dashboards. Admins set default permissions and per-dashboard edit rights using manage dashboard settings.

Learn how to add and manage a project wiki in Azure DevOps, using a Git-backed wiki with Markdown, subpages, drag-and-drop navigation, and user permissions for the Congress Security Group.

Create a new Scrum project in an Azure DevOps organization, explore work items such as epics, features, and product backlog items, assign users, and practice deleting the project.

Learn to set up and use git with Visual Studio Code, initialize an empty repository, and track files with version control. Configure global username and email to identify changes.

Learn essential Git commands and their usage, including commit, via official documentation. Practice running commands in the terminal or VS Code, or Command Prompt, and check Git status.

Discover how git versioning relies on commits, review changes via the staging area, and revert to earlier commits using git log and git checkout.

Learn how to commit local changes, push to GitHub, and understand the difference between local and origin main branches, including creating feature branches and using pull requests.

Explore publishing code to a Git repository using Visual Studio 2022 with a simple ASP.NET template, demonstrating Git version control, installing Visual Studio, and Git integration.

Learn to manage Git workflows from Visual Studio, push and pull changes with GitHub, resolve merge conflicts, and complete a merge to update the main branch with versioned edits.

Understand git merges in the AZ-400 DevOps context, including fast-forward merges from feature to main, conflict resolution, and history visualization with git log graph in VS Code.

Learn how Git performs automatic garbage collection and prune to remove unreferenced objects, and apply maintenance steps for data recovery and keeping a clean, version-controlled repository.

Learn to protect the main branch in Azure Repos with branch policies, including minimum reviewers and controlled merges, plus creating branches and completing pull requests.

Publish code from Visual Studio to Azure Repos and set up an Azure Pipelines workflow, then address the hosted parallelism error by submitting a parallelism increase request for private projects.

Azure Bots and Azure Repos integrate with Slack to notify items and pull requests, with commands like AZ Repos sign in and subscribe to all repositories or a specific URL.

Automate the building and testing of code every time developers commit changes, supporting continuous integration and incremental feature-branch updates to the main branch for faster deployments.

Explore self-hosted agents for Azure DevOps pipelines, learning why you might persist builds, install custom software, or move builds to on-premises, beyond the Microsoft hosted agent.

Increase build speed by enabling pipeline caching to reuse downloaded NuGet packages across runs. Add a cache task to avoid repeated internet downloads for NuGet packages across the solution.

Provision an Azure Ubuntu virtual machine, configure port 8080 access, install Jenkins and Java Development Kit, unlock with the initial admin password, install plugins, and create the first admin user.

Publish and transfer a .NET build as a zip artifact from the build to the release pipeline, then deploy the content to an Azure web app via continuous deployment.

Discover how to add a manual intervention in an Azure release pipeline, using an agentless task with instructions and a user assignment before deploying an Azure web app.

Learn to deploy a .NET web app on Azure web app that uses Azure SQL Database, and set up build and release pipelines to provision the database and data.

Build a Docker image for a .NET 6.0 app that uses Azure SQL Database, publishing files to an Ubuntu VM, creating a Dockerfile, and running the container on port 80.

Learn to automate docker image builds and push to Azure Container Registry using Azure Pipelines, including dockerfile inclusion, YAML workflows, and service connections for streamlined devops.

Create a release pipeline to deploy an existing image from the Azure container registry to an Azure container instance using an Azure CLI task, with a manual release.

Explore releasing to Kubernetes with a classic release pipeline, publishing app.yaml and service.yaml as artifacts, and deploying manifests via two Kubernetes tasks in Azure DevOps.

Manage deployment queue settings to limit deployments when multiple builds run, and decide to deploy all builds sequentially or discard older ones for the latest one.

Revise arm templates for deploying an Azure VM with a virtual network, two subnets, NIC, public IP, storage account for boot diagnostics, data disk, and a network security group.

Delete test environment resources in a release pipeline using Azure CLI, scripting deletions for SQL database, SQL server, web app, and app service plan, with a post deployment approval.

Deploy to multiple environments—test, staging, and production—using ARM templates and dynamic resource naming. Configure the pipeline to set SQL server name, web app name, and connection strings for staging database.

Propagate ARM template outputs into release pipelines by extracting web app and sql server names with a PowerShell script, then map them to release variables for dynamic deployments.

Use Azure CLI to build resources by creating an app service plan, an Azure BeBop web app, and an Azure SQL database server in a guided Cloud Shell workflow.

Download Terraform for Windows, add it to PATH, verify with terraform version, then use VS Code with HashiCorp Terraform and Azure Terraform extensions to build main.tf with providers and modules.

Extend a yaml build pipeline into a release pipeline. Deploy to Azure web app and Azure sql database using yaml tasks and artifacts.

Automate Azure VM deployment by using a Team Services agent extension to join deployment groups, and implement custom script extensions to install IIS and the ASP.NET hosting bundle.

Demonstrates blue-green deployment by running production in the blue environment while testing a newer version in the green environment, then switching traffic with minimal downtime.

Learn how to use Azure load balancer to manage blue-green deployments, including configuring a backend pool, health probe, and load balancing rules, and switching traffic to the green environment.

Execute a release pipeline task using Azure PowerShell to switch the load balancer backend pool from production to staging and verify the change.

Publish and consume packages with Azure Artifacts, including NuGet, npm, Maven, and Python, via private repositories and public feeds, enabling developers to use Newtonsoft.Json for JSON data.

Use selenium to run UI tests for a web app in a C# MS Test project, with chrome driver, asserting page titles, and integrate tests into an Azure DevOps pipeline.

Learn how to create and configure an Azure Key Vault to securely store secrets, certificates, and encryption keys, and prepare for integrating it with Azure pipelines.

Define a db password secret in Azure key vault and access it from a yaml pipeline using the Azure key vault secrets task, with service principal permissions and artifact publishing.

Review the instrumentation strategy using Azure Monitor and Application Insights to monitor Azure resources and web applications' performance. Focus on exam-relevant monitoring concepts for AZ-400.

Learn to set up alerts in Azure Monitor by defining resource scope, conditions on metrics like CPU percentage, and actions via an action group to notify teams or trigger runbooks.

Explore how Azure Monitor uses machine learning on historical metrics to set dynamic thresholds, detecting patterns and anomalies and triggering alerts on deviations.

Explore how the Log Analytics workspace centralizes logs from Azure VMs, on-prem servers, and Azure SQL database, enables connections via diagnostic settings, and supports query-driven insights with solutions and visualizations.

Create an Azure web app and an Application Insights resource, link them, and deploy an ASP.NET Core project from Visual Studio to monitor live telemetry and metrics using Application Insights.

Configure azure container instances probes in yaml deployment via container groups to enable liveness and readiness checks, automatically restarting unhealthy containers and delaying startup until dependencies like databases are ready.

Explore how to manage Azure DevOps notifications by using user settings to view and create subscriptions, receive email alerts for builds and pull requests, and tailor alerts for your pipeline.