Mastering AZ-400: The Ultimate Exam Preparation Guide
This guide focuses on all the specific information you need to know to pass your AZ-400 exam. It also covers links to training courses, books and other content you can use to perfect your study approach. Lastly, we also include links to practice exams and cover typical questions Azure students have as they embark upon their first adventures into Microsoft Azure.
If you are completely unsure where to begin in your certification journey, make sure to check out our post on certification paths.
If you like this guide, be sure to check out our other Azure Study Guides
What is the Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions Certification?
As a DevOps engineer, you’re a developer or infrastructure administrator who also has subject matter expertise in working with people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value in organizations.
Your responsibilities for this role include designing and implementing strategies for collaboration, code, infrastructure, source control, security, compliance, continuous integration, testing, delivery, monitoring, and feedback.
As a DevOps engineer, you work on cross-functional teams that include:
Developers
Site reliability engineers
Azure administrators
You must have experience with administering and developing in Azure, with strong skills in at least one of these areas. You should be familiar with:
Azure DevOps
GitHub
This remainder of this study guide will focus on the AZ-400 exam.
AZ-400 Exam Description
Before we begin, let’s look at the exam description as indicated by Microsoft on their AZ-400 site.
"DevOps engineers are developers or infrastructure administrators who also have subject matter expertise in working with people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value in organizations.
Responsibilities for this role include designing and implementing strategies for collaboration, code, infrastructure, source control, security, compliance, continuous integration, testing, delivery, monitoring, and feedback.
DevOps engineers work on cross-functional teams that include developers, site reliability engineers, and Azure administrators.
DevOps engineers must have experience with administering and developing in Azure, with strong skills in at least one of these areas. They should be familiar with both Azure DevOps and GitHub.”
Are you ready to do this? Are you committed? You won’t regret it. Let’s look at all the study material available.
FAQ
How long does it take to study for the AZ-400 exam?
The AZ-400, is an associate level certification. The curriculum has grown considerably from its early days, and you should be prepared to put some time in to your preparation. Before we discuss timing, think about how the exam is broken out. The AZ-400 test as of October 9th, 2023, covers 5 major areas as follows:
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%)
The percentages indicated above give you an indication on how the test is broken out. This means, you should expect around 40-45% of your questions to focus on designing and implementing build and release pipeline
How do I take the AZ-400 test?
Once you have completed your preparation, you will need to schedule your test online. Under normal circumstances you would take your test at a test center or online. You can find details about the online test centers at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/certifications/exams/az-400/
How hard is the AZ-400 exam?
The AZ-400 exam is a difficult exam! You should go into the exam expecting multiple types of questions. Multiple choice, scenarios, labs etc. One key is not to be overwhelmed as you get into the exam. You will have lots of questions to go through and you can often come back to questions you didn’t fully grasp at first. Make extra sure to get hands on experience by following along with the demos and trying things out for yourself in your own lab. If you are looking for ways to keep your costs down while learning Azure, check out this article.
What is the pass mark for the AZ-400 test?
Microsoft certification exams are scored out of 1000. You need a 700 or higher to pass the AZ-400 exam and gain your Azure Associate Badge.
Is the AZ-400 Azure exam worth taking?
Absolutely! even if certification is not your goal, you will gain an incredible amount of experience learning Azure at a deep level that will help you in your current job, or perhaps the next move in your career.
Does the AZ-400 exam expire?
The DevOps Engineer Expert Certification expires every twelve months. Renewal can be done via a free renewal assessment. Microsoft will refresh course content which is reflected in renewal questions, occasionally Microsoft will also increment exam numbers and retire exams when there are substantial curriculum changes for the certification.
AZ-400 Study Material
The Refactored.pro AZ-400 training course has hours of video content which focuses on the exam curriculum. The course is broken out into the following sections to match up with the Microsoft curriculum
Work Tracking
GitHub Integration
Git Repos
Pipelines & Agents
Infrastructure as Code
Package Management
Maintaining Sensitive Information
Analyzing Metrics
This is the most structured way to work through the curriculum as it combines lectures with walkthrough demos so you can learn about the topic before seeing how it is implemented.
Study links and documents
Now for the major pieces of reading material. Below you will find all the links to relevant Skylines Academy blog posts and Microsoft documentation to cover the key topics. Consider all the links below essential reading for the exam unless they are marked as optional. Even if they are marked as optional, consider reading them to further clarify the subject matter and help you continue your learning path beyond the architect certification.
Microsoft Docs AZ-400 study guide resources
One thing I always used to prepare for my Microsoft exams is Microsoft Docs. Here are the relevant Microsoft Docs which I used to prepare and study for the AZ-400 exam.
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 Advanced Security, including code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency scanning for both GitHub and Azure DevOps.
· Automate the use of 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
· Integrate GitHub Advanced Security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud
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
You made it this far? Fantastic. You learned a lot I hope and we want to help more!
Getting Help?
Make sure to join the Azure Study Group on Facebook and ask questions if you get stuck at all. Thousands of people are taking this exam and there’s nothing better than helping each other out?
Q&A
If you have any further questions, drop us a comment below and we will try to get you an answer.
Good luck!
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