Azure AZ-400 study guide
Azure AZ-400 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
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. The Azure AZ-400 study guide has 5 sections and about 1,745 words.
01Design and implement processes and communications
Azure DevOps ships four process templates - Basic, Agile, Scrum and CMMI - and the work item hierarchy changes with each one. Agile is Epic Feature User Story Task/Bug; Scrum replaces User Story with Product Backlog Item; CMMI inserts Requirement (and Change Request); Basic is Epic Issue Task.
370 words, about 2 min02Design and implement a source control strategy
Match branching to release cadence. Trunk-based development keeps main releasable, uses short-lived feature branches, feature flags and fast merges - the right pick for continuous delivery.
337 words, about 2 min03Design and implement build and release pipelines
YAML pipelines are trigger / pr → pool / variables → stages → jobs → steps → tasks . Templates come in two flavours: template: includes reusable snippets, while extends: enforces a structure so teams cannot skip mandatory steps.
323 words, about 2 min04Develop a security and compliance plan
Azure DevOps permissions flow from organisation and project groups (Project Collection Administrators, Project Administrators, Build Administrators, Contributors, Readers) down through object-level ACLs; inheritance can be disabled per object, which is a frequent question. Azure DevOps teams are not security groups - use Microsoft Entra ID groups for access.
369 words, about 2 min05Implement an instrumentation strategy
Application Insights records requests , dependencies , exceptions , traces , events and metrics . Workspace-based Application Insights stores everything in a Log Analytics workspace, so you query with KQL and can join across resources in the same workspace.
346 words, about 2 min