Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400) Practice Test
Build your confidence for Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400). Practice the concepts, understand the answers, and strengthen your knowledge one question at a time.
Try a sample questionExam overview and details
The Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400) certification validates the advanced technical skills required to design and implement DevOps practices for an organization. This expert-level credential demonstrates a professional's ability to combine people, processes, and technologies to continuously deliver valuable products and services that meet end-user needs and business objectives. Holders of this certification are proficient in designing and implementing strategies for collaboration, code, infrastructure, source control, security, compliance, and continuous integration, delivery, monitoring, and feedback. Achieving this certification signifies a deep understanding of how to unify development and operations teams, automate processes, and improve efficiency, reliability, and security across the entire application lifecycle. It is a critical credential for professionals aiming to lead digital transformation initiatives and optimize software delivery pipelines in complex, cloud-native environments.
Sample Questions
Choose an answer and explore the explanation to see how practice works.
You are designing a Git branching strategy for a team developing a SaaS application with monthly feature releases and hotfix deployments. The team needs to maintain a stable main branch while allowing parallel development of multiple features. Which Git branching strategy should you recommend to minimize merge conflicts while ensuring code quality?
A new API program needs living documentation for architecture decisions and pipeline ownership. The team wants diagrams stored with the project and rendered in the portal. Which recommendation best meets the requirement with the least operational risk?
A secret-scanning alert indicates a token was pushed, then immediately deleted in a later commit. Which recommendation best meets the requirement with the least operational risk?
Your organization uses Git in Azure Repos with a main branch for production-ready code. You need to enforce that all changes to the main branch are made via pull requests that pass a successful build and require at least one reviewer. Which two Git policies must you configure on the main branch?
Contoso Retail Contoso has a multi-service .NET application. Their Azure DevOps YAML pipeline builds the solution and runs unit tests in a single job. They now need to deploy the application to a Development environment for integration testing, and only upon successful testing, deploy to a Production environment. The Production deployment must be manually approved.
Based on the scenario, which YAML pipeline structure should you recommend to meet the new requirements?
Career Opportunities & Salary
Exam insights and study advice
In today's competitive technology landscape, the ability to streamline software delivery and ensure operational excellence is paramount. The AZ-400 certification provides industry-recognized validation of your expertise in bridging the gap between development and operations, a skill set in high demand. It signals to employers and peers that you possess the strategic and technical acumen to implement robust DevOps cultures and toolchains, directly impacting business agility and resilience. This credential is a powerful differentiator for career advancement, often associated with senior and lead roles such as DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, and Platform Engineer, and is a cornerstone for professionals working with Microsoft Azure's extensive DevOps ecosystem.
Your Path Forward
What this exam covers
Use the published domain weights to plan your study. Practice results do not predict your certification exam score.
01Design and implement build and release pipelines
Topics
- Design and implement a package management strategy
- Design and implement a testing strategy for pipelines
- Design and implement pipelines
- Design and implement deployments
- Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC)
- Maintain pipelines
Learning objectives
- Design and implement a package management strategy: Recommend package management tools including GitHub Packages and Azure Artifacts; Design and implement package feeds and views for local and upstream packages; Design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning (SemVer) and date-based (CalVer); Design and implement a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts
- Design and implement a testing strategy for pipelines: Design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance; Design a comprehensive testing strategy, including local tests, unit tests, integration tests, and load tests; Implement tests in a pipeline, including configuring test tasks, configuring test agents, and integration of test results; Implement code coverage analysis
- Design and implement pipelines: Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines; Design and implement a GitHub runner or Azure DevOps agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability; Design and implement integration between GitHub repositories and Azure Pipelines; Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules; Develop pipelines by using YAML; Design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage pipelines; Develop and implement complex pipeline scenarios, such as hybrid pipelines, VM templates, and self-hosted runners or agents; Create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups; Design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML-based 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 that dependency deployments are reliably ordered; Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using load balancing, rolling deployments, and deployment slot usage and swap; Design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes; Design and implement a resiliency strategy for deployment; Implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager; Implement application deployment by using containers, binaries, and scripts; Implement a deployment that includes database tasks
- Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC): Recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure; Implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure; 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 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 a pipeline for cost, time, performance, and reliability; Optimize pipeline concurrency for performance and cost; Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies; Migrate a pipeline from classic to YAML in Azure Pipelines
02Design and implement a source control strategy
Topics
- Design and implement branching strategies for the source code
- Configure and manage repositories
Learning objectives
- Design 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 protection rules; Implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protection rules
- Configure and manage repositories: Design and implement 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; Configure permissions in the source control repository; Configure tags to organize the source control repository; Recover specific data by using Git commands; Remove specific data from source control
03Design and implement processes and communications
Topics
- Design and implement traceability and flow of work
- Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for DevOps
- Configure collaboration and communication
Learning objectives
- Design and implement traceability and flow of work: Design and implement a structure for the flow of work, including GitHub Flow; Design and implement a strategy for feedback cycles, including notifications and GitHub issues; Design and implement integration for tracking work, including GitHub projects, Azure Boards, and repositories; Design and implement source, bug, and quality traceability
- Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for DevOps: Design and implement a dashboard, including flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time; Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for project planning; Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for development; Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for testing; Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for security; Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for delivery; Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for operations
- Configure collaboration and communication: Document a project by configuring wikis and process diagrams, including Markdown and Mermaid syntax; Configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation; Automate creation of documentation from Git history; Configure integration by using webhooks; Configure integration between Azure Boards and GitHub repositories; Configure integration between GitHub or Azure DevOps and Microsoft Teams
04Develop a security and compliance plan
Topics
- Design and implement authentication and authorization methods
- Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation
- Automate security and compliance scanning
Learning objectives
- Design and implement authentication and authorization methods: Choose between Microsoft Entra service principals and managed identities for Azure resources (system-assigned and user-assigned); Implement and manage GitHub authentication, including GitHub Apps, GITHUB_TOKEN, and personal access tokens; Implement and manage Azure DevOps service connections and personal access tokens; Design and implement permissions and roles in GitHub; Design and implement permissions and security groups in Azure DevOps; Recommend appropriate access levels, including stakeholder access in Azure DevOps and outside collaborator access in GitHub; Configure projects and teams in Azure DevOps
- Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation: Implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault; Implement and manage secrets and secretless authentication (for example, workload identity federation/OpenID Connect) in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines; Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment, including Azure Pipelines secure files; Design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information
- Automate security and compliance scanning: Design a strategy for security and compliance scanning, including dependency, code, secret, and licensing scanning; Configure Microsoft Defender for Cloud DevOps Security; Configure GitHub Advanced Security for both GitHub and Azure DevOps; Integrate GitHub Advanced Security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud; Automate container scanning, including scanning container images and configuring an action to run CodeQL analysis in a container; Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Dependabot alerts
05Implement an instrumentation strategy
Topics
- Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment
- Analyze metrics from instrumentation
Learning objectives
- Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment: Configure Azure Monitor and Azure Monitor Logs to integrate with DevOps tools; Configure collection of telemetry by using Application Insights, VM Insights, Container Insights, Azure Monitor for Storage, and Azure Monitor for Networks; Configure monitoring in GitHub, including enabling insights and creating and configuring charts; Configure alerts for events in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
- Analyze metrics from instrumentation: Inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network; Analyze metrics by using collected telemetry, including usage and application performance; Inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights; Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries