Microsoft AZ-400 Exam Practice Questions *Updated Oct 2023*

The course includes the below concepts for the exam:

*Updated Oct 2023*

Skills at a glance

• Configure processes and communications (10–15%)

• Design and implement source control (15–20%)

• Design and implement build and release pipelines (40–45%)

• Develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%)

• Implement an instrumentation strategy (10–15%)

Configure processes and communications (10–15%)

Configure activity traceability and flow of work

• 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 Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions with work item tracking tools

• Implement traceability policies decided by development

• Integrate a repository with Azure Boards

Configure collaboration and communication

• Communicate actionable information by using custom dashboards in Azure Boards

• 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

Design and implement source control (15–20%)

Design and implement a source control strategy

• Design and implement an authentication strategy

• Design a strategy for managing large files, including Git Large File Storage (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

Configure and manage repositories

• Integrate GitHub repositories with Azure Pipelines

• 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

Design and implement build and release pipelines (40–45%)

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 pipelines

• Design and implement a comprehensive testing strategy (including local tests, unit tests, integration tests, and load tests)

• Design and implement UI testing

• 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 virtual IP address (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 Automanage Machine Configuration

• Design and implement Azure Deployment Environments for on-demand self-deployment

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

Develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%)

Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation

• 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 Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)

• Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Mend Bolt and GitHub Dependency Scanning

Implement an instrumentation strategy (10–15%)

Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment

• Configure and integrate monitoring by using Azure Monitor

• Configure and integrate with monitoring tools, such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and the Prometheus managed service

• 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 Insights

• Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries

• I hope you find this course useful for your studies,

Let me know if I can assist in anyway,

Happy learning!

Neil