Azure AZ-400 case studies

Azure AZ-400 · Put your knowledge to work in context.

AZ-400, Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions, is the single required exam for the Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert credential. It targets developers or infrastructure administrators who combine people, process, and product expertise to enable continuous delivery of value, and who work on cross-functional teams alongside developers, site reliability engineers, Azure administrators, and security engineers. Microsoft recommends experience administering and developing in Azure - with strong skills in at least one of those areas - plus hands-on experience implementing both GitHub and Azure DevOps solutions. The exam measures five skill areas: design and implement processes and communications (10–15%), design and implement a source control strategy (10–15%), design and implement build and release pipelines (50–55%), develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%), and implement an instrumentation strategy (5–10%). The Azure AZ-400 case studies are 5 cases and about 3,228 words.

Contoso Payments: Dependency Visibility Without Meeting Overload

Contoso Payments has five teams (4-9 engineers) using Azure Boards for planning and GitHub for code. Four teams run two-week sprints; the platform team runs three-week sprints.

638 words, about 3 min 2

Fabrikam: One Repository, Four Release Cadences

Fabrikam has six teams sharing one Azure Repos Git repository: 12 GB, nine years of history, including roughly 400 MB of design files under /assets that change weekly. A fresh clone takes 25 minutes and branch builds take 18 minutes.

629 words, about 3 min 3

Tailwind: Regional Rollout and a 45-Minute Rollback

Tailwind runs 40 microservices on AKS in three regions, deployed by one YAML pipeline. Build takes 22 minutes on Microsoft-hosted agents with no caching, and every service builds on every commit.

628 words, about 3 min 4

Northwind: Proving Least Privilege to an External Auditor

Northwind has 30 Azure Pipelines service connections, 12 of them with subscription-level Contributor. Three personal access tokens with full scope back the release process, and SQL and storage credentials sit as plaintext secret variables in two variable groups.

678 words, about 3 min 5

Skipper: 3,000 Alerts a Week and a Broken Trace

Skipper runs 40 services on AKS plus Azure Functions, each with its own Application Insights resource. Telemetry is a mix of ILogger, custom events, and Serilog writing to files on the Functions.

655 words, about 3 min