Audience Profile :

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.

Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
• 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%)

Skills Measured :

NOTE : The bullets that appear below each of the skills measured are intended to illustrate how we are assessing that skill. This list is NOT definitive or exhaustive.

NOTE : Most questions cover features that are General Availability (GA). The exam may contain questions on Preview features if those features are commonly used.

COURSE CONTENT :

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 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

Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions

• Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using 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

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

Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions

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 and Application Insights
• 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

Module 1: Introduction to Azure Sentinel

• Overview of Azure Sentinel.
• Understanding the role of a SIEM and SOAR solution in cybersecurity.
• Azure Sentinel architecture and components.

Module 2: Data Ingestion and Data Connectors

• Configuring data connectors to collect data from various sources.
• Data ingestion best practices.
• Common data sources and their connectors.

Module 3: Data Queries and Investigations

• Introduction to Kusto Query Language (KQL).
• Writing queries to analyze and investigate security data.
• Creating custom workbooks for data visualization.

Module 4: Alerts and Incidents Management

• Creating and managing security alerts in Azure Sentinel.
• Incident management and response workflows.
• Automation and orchestration of incident response tasks.

Module 5: Threat Intelligence and Threat Detection

• Incorporating threat intelligence feeds into Azure Sentinel.
• Customizing and fine-tuning threat detection rules.
• Behavioral analytics and anomaly detection.

Module 6: Integration with Azure and Third-Party Services

• Integrating Azure services like Azure Active Directory and Azure Security Center.
• Connecting third-party security solutions.
• Using Logic Apps and Playbooks for automation.

Module 7: User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)

• Understanding UEBA in Azure Sentinel.
• Detecting and responding to suspicious user and entity activities.
• Behavioral profiling and analysis.

Module 8: Compliance and Reporting

• Generating compliance reports.
• Meeting regulatory and compliance requirements.
• Auditing and monitoring in Azure Sentinel.

Module 9: Advanced Threat Hunting

• Proactive threat hunting techniques.
• Building custom threat hunting queries.
• Leveraging advanced hunting tools and capabilities.

Module 10: Security Orchestration and Automation

• Designing and automating security workflows.
• Creating and managing playbooks.
• Integration with Azure Logic Apps.

Module 11: Azure Sentinel Deployment and Scaling

• Deployment options for Azure Sentinel.
• Scaling Azure Sentinel for large-scale environments.
• Best practices for managing a Sentinel workspace.

Module 12: Real-World Scenarios and Use Cases

• Analyzing real-world cybersecurity scenarios.
• Creating solutions for specific security challenges.
• Case studies and hands-on exercises.

Module 13: Azure Sentinel Certification Preparation

• Overview of Azure Sentinel certification (if available).
• Tips and resources for certification exam preparation

Most Probable Interview Questions for Azure DevOps