By: Daniel Calbimonte | Comments (2) | Related: More > Professional Development Certifications
Problem
There is a new Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions. In this tip we will cover some resources to help you prepare for this new Microsoft exam.
Solution
Below you will find helpful information for the AZ-400 exam.
Who should take this exam?
This exam is oriented to developers or IT members mainly. DevOps is oriented to integrate Development and Operations (IT operations). If you work with technology and software, DevOps will help you to increase the efficiency of operations.
What is DevOps?
We wrote an article before about this topic that may be useful to answer that question:
Is the exam difficult?
Yes, it covers a lot of topics and requires multiple skills. It is considered very difficult.
Which books would you recommend for this exam?
You can read the following books:
- The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
- DevOps Book.
- Introducing Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2017
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
- The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise
- DevOps: 2 Manuscripts - DevOps Handbook and DevOps Adoption
- Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
- O'Reilly NuGet 2 Essentials
- The Kubernetes Book: Version 3 - November 2018
- DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective (SEI Series in Software Engineering)
- Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale
- Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes: Building, Deploying, and Scaling Modern Applications in the Cloud
- Implementing DevOps with Microsoft Azure
- Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure: Best Practices for DevOps, Data Storage, High Availability, and More (Developer Reference)
- Azure for Architects: Implementing cloud design, DevOps, IoT, and serverless solutions on your public cloud
- Microservices, IoT and Azure: Leveraging DevOps and Microservice Architecture to deliver SaaS Solutions
Are there some courses for this exam?
Yes, the following courses will be useful:
- AZ-400: Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions
- Microsoft Professional Program for DevOps
- DevOps Certification Training Course
- Introduction to NuGet
- DevOps Certifications
- Docker Crash Course for busy DevOps and Developers
- Docker Mastery: The Complete Toolset From a Docker Captain
- Docker and Kubernetes: The Complete Guide
- Azure AKS: Azure Kubernetes Service | Docker Kubernetes
Could you provide some links to study, for this exam?
Yes. The following links will be useful:
Design a DevOps Strategy
- Recommend a migration and consolidation strategy for DevOps tools
- Design and implement an Agile work management approach
- Design a quality strategy
- Exploratory & Manual Testing
- Shift Left to Make Testing Fast and Reliable
- Progressive Experimentation with Feature Flags
- Managing technical debt with SonarQube and Azure DevOps
- Managing Technical Debt with Azure DevOps and SonarCloud
- What Team Structure is Right for DevOps to Flourish?
- 10 ways to build highly effective DevOps teams
- Scaling Agile - Practices that scale
- Automated and Manual Testing with Azure Test Plan
- Developing a Testing Strategy for DevOps Success
- Azure Test Plans
- Design a secure development process
- Tutorial: Create a CI/CD pipeline for your existing code by using Azure DevOps Projects
- Monitoring and diagnostics
- Simplify, speed, and improve cloud development
- Learn how to add continuous security validation to your CI/CD pipeline
- Build and Deployment Automation Case Study for World Wide Time Keeping: Higher Quality and Faster Delivery in an Increasingly Agile World
- Building cloud apps using the Secure DevOps Kit for Azure
- Design a tool integration strategy
- Manage users and their access in Azure DevOps
- Parallel jobs
- Set up environments to run continuous test tasks with your build tasks.
- Use all the DevOps services
- License Azure Artifacts
- Explore work items with the Test & Feedback extension
- Which tools and clients connect to Azure DevOps Services and TFS?
- Data protection overview
- How we store your credentials for Azure DevOps Services
- Go on-premises with Team Foundation Server
- Deploy to Azure
- Azure DevOps
Implement DevOps Development Processes
- Design a version control strategy
- Adopt a Git branching strategy
- Use branches to isolate risk in Team Foundation Version Control
- Branch folders and files
- Learn about branching strategies for Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and how to select an effective strategy
- View where and when changesets have been merged
- View the branch hierarchy of a project
- Associate a file type with a file-comparison tool
- Implement and integrate source control
- Implement and manage build infrastructure
- Implement code flow
- Implement a mobile DevOps strategy
- Managing application configuration and secrets
- Data protection overview
- How we store your credentials for Azure DevOps Services
- About keys, secrets, and certificates
- Deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using DevOps Projects – VSTS Sprint 134 Update
- CI-CD for Azure Kubernetes Service AKS using Azure DevOps
- CI/CD for Containers
- Pipeline compliance and security validations - Sprint 141 Update
Implement Continuous Integration
- Manage code quality and security policies
- Continuous integration and deployment
- Design a CI/CD pipeline using Azure DevOps
- Review code coverage results
- Publish Code Coverage Results task
- Azure Test Plans
- Deep dive into Azure Test Plans
- Review test results
- Analyze test results
- Test Suites
- Create test plans and test suites
- Create manual test cases
- Run manual tests
- Use SonarQube with Azure DevOps or Team Foundation Server (TFS) for Java development
- WhiteSource Bolt in Visual Studio subscriptions
- Azure DevOps Projects
- Implement a container build strategy
- Implement a build strategy
Implement Continuous Delivery
- Design a release strategy
- Set up a release management workflow
- Release deployment control using gates
- Run Functional Tests task
- Run automated tests from test plans
- What are release pipelines?
- Release pipelines and release names
- AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) Security & Identity updates | Best of Microsoft Ignite 2018
- Build and deploy microservices on Azure Service Fabric Mesh
- Application Delivery & DevOps practices with Azure Service Fabric
- Deploy a web app to Azure App Services
- Define your multi-stage continuous deployment (CD) pipeline
- Azure Key Vault task
- Release stages, queuing policies, and options
- Implement an appropriate deployment pattern
- Blue-Green deployments using Azure Traffic Manager
- Tutorial: Canary Deployment for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- Explore how to progressively expose your Azure DevOps extension releases in production to validate, before impacting all users
- Multiple jobs
- Deployment groups
- Deploying a multi-container application to Azure Kubernetes Services
- Tutorial: Deploy an application with CI/CD to a Service Fabric cluster
Implement Dependency Management
- Design a dependency management strategy
- Manage security and compliance
Implement Application Infrastructure
- Design an infrastructure and configuration management strategy
- Implement Infrastructure as Code
- Manage Azure Kubernetes Service infrastructure
- Tutorial: Using Azure DevOps to setup a CI/CD pipeline and deploy to Kubernetes
- Deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using DevOps Projects – VSTS Sprint 134 Update
- Deploying a multi-container application to Azure Kubernetes Services
- Deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Azure DevOps and Helm
- Scaling Agile - Practices that scale
- Implement infrastructure compliance and security
Implement Continuous Feedback
- Recommend and design system feedback mechanisms
- How to leverage the cloud to improve customer satisfaction
- Example: How to detect sentiment in Text Analytics
- Real-time Twitter sentiment analysis in Azure Stream Analytics
- Provide feedback using the Test & Feedback extension
- HokeyApp support
- End-to-end monitoring solutions in Azure for Apps and Infrastructure
- Add continuous monitoring to your release pipeline
- What features and services do I get with Azure DevOps Services or TFS?
- DevOps tool integrations
- Implement process for routing system feedback to development teams
- Crash Reports
- Add, rename, and delete team dashboards in Azure DevOps
- Zendesk with Azure DevOps Services
- ServiceNow Integration with Azure DevOps (VSTS)
- New Azure Pipelines announcements – VS Code extension, GitHub Releases, and more
- Application Insights: Work item integration with Visual Studio Team Services
- Optimize feedback mechanisms
Next Steps
For more information about this exam, refer to these links:
- Azure DevOps AZ-400 Exam – Study Notes
- AZ-400 Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions Certification Exam
- How to Pass the AZ-400 Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions (beta) Exam
- Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
About the author
Daniel Calbimonte is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, Microsoft Certified Trainer and 6-time Microsoft Certified IT Professional. Daniel started his career in 2001 and has worked with SQL Server 6.0 to 2022. Daniel is a DBA as well as specializes in Business Intelligence (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS) technologies.This author pledges the content of this article is based on professional experience and not AI generated.
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