Is the Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam worth it?

The Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam is a valuable certification for professionals who are interested in developing and delivering high-quality software using Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps. The Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam, also known as the Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions exam, is a certification exam that tests a candidate’s knowledge of developing and delivering high-quality software using Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps.The exam measures your proficiency in areas such as planning and designing a DevOps strategy, implementing DevOps development processes, implementing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), managing application infrastructure, and monitoring and logging. Let us begin by knowing a little more about the exam.

Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam

The Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions AZ-400 exam is designed for DevOps professionals who have earned the Azure Developer Associate or Azure Administrator Associate badge. The Microsoft Azure AZ-400 exam assesses a candidate’s ability to design and implement a DevOps strategy, including DevOps development processes, dependency management, application infrastructure, and continuous integration, delivery, and feedback. A DevOps professional’s responsibilities include the following:

• Streamlining delivery through practice optimization
• Improving Collaboration and Communication
• Making Automation
• Create and implement application code and infrastructure strategies.

Target Audience:

The Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam is designed for professionals who have experience in developing and delivering high-quality software using Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps. The exam is targeted towards individuals who are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing DevOps solutions and processes.

The target audience for the AZ-400 Exam includes:

• DevOps professionals: DevOps professionals who want to validate their skills and knowledge in designing and implementing DevOps solutions using Microsoft Azure can benefit from the AZ-400 Exam.
• Developers: Developers who want to enhance their knowledge of Azure DevOps and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices can also take the AZ-400 Exam.
• IT professionals: IT professionals who are responsible for managing application infrastructure and monitoring and logging can benefit from the AZ-400 Exam.
• Solution architects: Solution architects who want to design and implement DevOps solutions using Microsoft Azure can also take the AZ-400 Exam.
• Technical leads: Technical leads who are responsible for managing and leading software development teams can benefit from the AZ-400 Exam.

Exam Structure

The Microsoft Azure AZ-400 exam consists of 40-60 multiple-choice questions. The AZ-400 exam questions, on the other hand, will be multiple choice/multiple response questions that must be completed in 150 minutes. Microsoft states that to pass the AZ-400 exam, the candidate must score at least 700 points. The AZ-400 certification fee is USD 165, which includes all applicable taxes. The exam is also available in four languages: English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and Korean.

Let us now move to the main point of the article –

Is the Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam worth it?

There’s no denying that Microsoft certifications in general, and Microsoft Azure certifications in particular, are valuable. The value of passing the AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions exam depends on your career objectives.

The certification can be beneficial for both individuals and organizations. For individuals, the certification can help improve their job prospects, increase their earning potential, and provide validation of their skills and knowledge. For organizations, hiring individuals with the Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert certification can help ensure that their DevOps practices are implemented effectively and efficiently, leading to improved software development and delivery.

However, it’s important to note that obtaining the certification requires significant time, effort, and financial investment. Candidates must have a strong understanding of Azure services and DevOps practices, and they must pass a rigorous exam. Additionally, maintaining the certification requires candidates to stay up-to-date on changes to the exam content and objectives.

Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam can be worth it for individuals who are interested in pursuing a career in DevOps and for organizations that want to ensure that their DevOps practices are implemented effectively. However, candidates should carefully consider the costs and benefits of obtaining the certification before pursuing it.

Let us now look at the course outline to get more clarity about the exam objectives –

Exam Course Outline

Find the course outline mentioned below –

1. 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 (Microsoft Documentation: How Microsoft plans with DevOps)
• Identify appropriate metrics related to flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time (Microsoft Documentation: Lead Time and Cycle Time widgets)
• Integrate Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions with work item tracking tools
• Implement traceability policies decided by development (Microsoft Documentation: End-to-end traceability)
• Integrate a repository with Azure Boards (Microsoft Documentation: Connect Azure Boards to GitHub (Cloud))

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 (Microsoft Documentation: Create a wiki for your project)
• Configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation (Microsoft Documentation: Releases, Releases – List)
• Automate creation of documentation from Git history (Microsoft Documentation: Understand Git history simplification)
• Configure notifications by using webhooks (Microsoft Documentation: Set up notifications for changes in resource data)

2. Design and implement source control (15—20%)

Design and implement a source control strategy

• Design and implement an authentication strategy (Microsoft Documentation: Design authentication and credential strategies)
• Design 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 (Microsoft Documentation: Git limits)
• Implement workflow hooks (Microsoft Documentation: Webhooks)

Plan and implement branching strategies for the source code

• Design a branch strategy, including trunk-based, feature branch, and release branch (Microsoft Documentation: Adopt a Git branching strategy)
• Design and implement a pull request workflow by using branch policies and branch protections (Microsoft Documentation: Branch policies and settings)
• Implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protections (Microsoft Documentation: About branches and branch policies)

Configure and manage repositories

• Integrate GitHub repositories with Azure Pipelines
• Configure permissions in the source control repository (Microsoft Documentation: Set Git repository permissions)
• Configure tags to organize the source control repository (Microsoft Documentation: Set Git repository settings and policies)
• Recover data by using Git commands (Microsoft Documentation: Git command reference)
• Purge data from source control (Microsoft Documentation: Remove access to version control files)

3. 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 (Microsoft Documentation: Securing Azure Pipelines)
• Design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance (Microsoft Documentation: Deployment gates)
• Designing integration of automated tests into a pipeline (Microsoft Documentation: Design a CI/CD pipeline using Azure DevOps)
• 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 (Microsoft Documentation: Compare and contrast 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 (Microsoft Documentation: Get started with NuGet packages in Azure Artifacts)
• Design and implement package feeds, including upstream sources (Microsoft Documentation: Upstream sources)
• Design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning and date-based (Microsoft Documentation: Implement a versioning strategy, Package versioning)
• Design and implement a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts (Microsoft Documentation: Implement a versioning strategy)

Design and implement pipelines

• Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines (Microsoft Documentation: Deploy to App Service using GitHub Actions)
• Design and implement an agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability
• Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules (Microsoft Documentation: Trigger one pipeline after another)
• Develop pipelines, including classic and YAML (Microsoft Documentation: Create your first pipeline)
• Design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage (Microsoft Documentation: Task Parallel Library (TPL), jobs.job.strategy definition)
• Develop complex pipeline scenarios, such as containerized agents and hybrid (Microsoft Documentation: Define container jobs (YAML))
• Configure and manage self-hosted agents, including virtual machine (VM) templates and containerization (Microsoft Documentation: Run a self-hosted agent in Docker)
• Create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups (Microsoft Documentation: Define variables)
• Design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML environments (Microsoft Documentation: Release deployment control using approvals)

Design and implement deployments

• Design a deployment strategy, including blue/green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, feature flags, and A/B testing (Microsoft Documentation: Progressive experimentation with feature flags)
• Design a pipeline to ensure reliable order of dependency deployments (Microsoft Documentation: Add stages, dependencies, & conditions)
• Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using using virtual IP address (VIP) swap, load balancer, and rolling deployments (Microsoft Documentation: Swap or switch deployments in Azure Cloud Services)
• Design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes (Microsoft Documentation: Using a hotfix production environment)
• Implement load balancing for deployment, including Azure Traffic Manager and the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service (Microsoft Documentation: Traffic Manager)
• Implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager (Microsoft Documentation: Manage feature flags in Azure App Configuration)
• Implement application deployment by using containers, binary, and scripts (Microsoft Documentation: App Service overview)

Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC)

• Recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure (Microsoft Documentation: Configuration Manager)
• Implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure, including IaC (Microsoft Documentation: infrastructure as code (IaC))
• Define an IaC strategy, including source control and automation of testing and deployment (Microsoft Documentation: infrastructure as code (IaC))
• Design and implement desired state configuration for environments, including Azure Automation State Configuration, Azure Resource Manager, Bicep, and Azure Automanage 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 (Microsoft Documentation: Manage flaky tests)
• Optimize pipelines for cost, time, performance, and reliability (Microsoft Documentation: Tradeoffs for performance efficiency)
• Analyze pipeline load to determine agent configuration and capacity (Microsoft Documentation: Azure Pipelines agents)
• Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies (Microsoft Documentation: Set retention policies for builds, releases, and tests)

4. Develop a security and compliance plan (10—15%)

Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation

• Implement and manage service connections (Microsoft Documentation: Manage service connections)
• Implement and manage personal access tokens (Microsoft Documentation: Use personal access tokens)
• Implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault, GitHub secrets, and Azure Pipelines secrets (Microsoft Documentation: Use Azure Key Vault secrets in Azure Pipelines)
• Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment (Microsoft Documentation: Azure data security and encryption best practices)
• Design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information (Microsoft Documentation: Design a data loss prevention policy)

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 Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) (Microsoft Documentation: Develop secure applications on Azure)
• Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Mend Bolt and GitHub Dependency Scanning

5. Implement an instrumentation strategy (10—15%)

Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment

• Configure and integrate monitoring by using Azure Monitor (Microsoft Documentation: Azure Monitor overview)
• Configure and integrate with monitoring tools, such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and the Prometheus managed service (Microsoft Documentation: Application Insights overview)
• Manage access control to the monitoring platform (Microsoft Documentation: Manage access to Log Analytics workspaces)
• Configure alerts for pipeline events (Microsoft Documentation: Azure Monitor Alerts task)

Analyze metrics

• Inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights (Microsoft Documentation: distributed tracing)
• Inspect application performance indicators (Microsoft Documentation: Application Insights overview)
• Inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network (Microsoft Documentation: Supported metrics with Azure Monitor)
• Identify and monitor metrics for business value (Microsoft Documentation: Using business metrics to design resilient Azure applications)
• Analyze usage metrics by using Application Insight (Microsoft Documentation: Application Insights overview)
• Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries (Microsoft Documentation: Log queries in Azure Monitor)

Let us now have a look at some resources that will help you ace the exam –

Get Familiar With the Key Terms

Here are some key terms and concepts that you should be familiar with when preparing for the Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam:

• Azure DevOps: A cloud-based service provided by Microsoft for application development, version control, build and release automation, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).
• Continuous integration (CI): A DevOps practice that involves building and testing code changes frequently to catch errors early in the development process.
• Continuous delivery (CD): A DevOps practice that involves automating the deployment process to quickly and reliably deploy code changes to production.
• Infrastructure as code (IaC): The practice of defining and managing infrastructure in a declarative manner using code, allowing for consistent and repeatable infrastructure deployment.
• Deployment slots: An Azure feature that allows you to deploy and test changes to your application before deploying to production.
• Release gates: A DevOps practice that involves adding checkpoints to a deployment pipeline to ensure that specific conditions are met before releasing changes to production.
• Azure Resource Manager (ARM): An Azure service that allows you to deploy, manage, and organize Azure resources using declarative templates.
• Test-driven development (TDD): A software development practice that involves writing automated tests before writing the code to ensure that the code meets the desired requirements.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): A fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service provided by Microsoft.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA): A contract between a service provider and a customer that specifies the level of service that the provider will deliver.

Microsoft Documentation

Microsoft provides documentation that includes various learning pages. You can easily understand Microsoft azure expert’s solution DevOps fundamentals by using Microsoft documentation. Microsoft documentation provides a much more detailed understanding of the various scales of different Azure services. This will ensure that you are working around the clock and learning a lot about azure technologies that are being offered to you directly by industry experts.

AZ-400: Get started on a DevOps transformation journey

Instructor-Led Training

Microsoft offers both online and instructor-led training options. These instructor-led training courses are essentially on-demand classroom sessions that you can easily arrange anywhere and at any time. These training sessions will give you an advantage on the AZ-400 exam. So, once you’ve found a Microsoft training partner, all you have to do is go to their website to book training sections.

Course AZ-400T00: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps solutions

Online Forums

Enrolling in any study group or forum is entirely subjective, implying that online forums are not required but rather an option. Candidates preparing for the AZ-400 exam can boost their confidence by joining any study group or forum. Online forums are the best because they connect you to everyone else who is going through the same thing you are. You can always ask a question about the topic you’re struggling with or simply assist the other candidates.

Practice Tests

After you have completed your preparation phase, you will begin your performance phase. This phase is also known as the self-evaluation phase because it assists you in determining your core strengths and weaknesses. Remember that you can only begin taking AZ-400 practice tests after you have completed your entire syllabus. Practice tests are created in such a way that they allow candidates to experience the real exam environment around them.

AZ-400 Exam Quick Study Tips

Preparing for the Microsoft Azure AZ-400 Exam can be a challenging task, but with the right tips and strategies, you can improve your chances of success. Here are some tips to help you prepare for the exam:

• Understand the exam objectives: Make sure to review the exam objectives and understand the topics and skills that will be covered in the exam.
• Use Microsoft resources: Microsoft offers a variety of resources to help you prepare for the exam, including online training courses, practice exams, and study guides. Take advantage of these resources to gain a deeper understanding of Azure DevOps and to practice applying your knowledge to real-world scenarios.
• Hands-on experience: It’s important to have hands-on experience working with Azure DevOps and implementing DevOps practices in real-world scenarios. This can help you gain a deeper understanding of the concepts and prepare you for the exam.
• Practice time management: The AZ-400 Exam is a timed exam, so it’s important to practice time management skills to ensure that you have enough time to complete all the questions.
• Use a study group or partner: Studying with a group or partner can help you stay motivated and engaged, as well as provide an opportunity to discuss and clarify complex concepts.
• Take breaks and manage stress: It’s important to take breaks and manage stress while preparing for the exam. This can help you stay focused and improve your performance on the day of the exam.
• Review exam feedback: After taking the exam, review your exam feedback to understand your strengths and weaknesses. This can help you identify areas where you need to improve and adjust your study strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

The AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions exam is intended to be the final step in earning the Microsoft Azure DevOps certification path’s crown jewel. Anyone who can master the seven domains targeted by the AZ-400 has proven that they belong in DevOps based on their skill and proficiency. So begin practicing right away!