AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions

In this AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions course, you'll learn:

Design and Implement Processes and Communications

• Design and implement traceability and flow of work
  • Design and implement a structure for the flow of work, including GitHub Flow
  • Design and implement a strategy for feedback cycles, including notifications and GitHub issues
  • Design and implement integration for tracking work, including GitHub projects, Azure Boards, and repositories
  • Design and implement source, bug, and quality traceability
• Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for DevOps
  • Design and implement a dashboard, including flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for project planning
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for development
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for testing
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for security
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for delivery
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for operations
• Configure collaboration and communication
  • Document a project by configuring wikis and process diagrams, including Markdown and Mermaid syntax
  • Configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation
  • Automate creation of documentation from Git history
  • Configure integration by using webhooks
  • Configure integration between Azure Boards and GitHub repositories
  • Configure integration between GitHub or Azure DevOps and Microsoft Teams

Design and Implement a Source Control Strategy

• Design 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 protection rules
  • Implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protection rules
• Configure and manage repositories
  • Design and implement 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
  • Configure permissions in the source control repository
  • Configure tags to organize the source control repository
  • Recover specific data by using Git commands
  • Remove specific data from source control

Design and Implement Build and Release Pipelines

• Design and implement a package management strategy
  • Recommend package management tools including GitHub Packages and Azure Artifacts
  • Design and implement package feeds and views for local and upstream packages
  • Design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning (SemVer) and date-based (CalVer)
  • Design and implement a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts
• Design and implement a testing strategy for pipelines
  • Design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance
  • Design a comprehensive testing strategy, including local tests, unit tests, integration tests, and load tests
  • Implement tests in a pipeline, including configuring test tasks, configuring test agents, and integration of test results
  • Implement code coverage analysis
• Design and implement pipelines
  • Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
  • Design and implement a GitHub runner or Azure DevOps agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability
  • Design and implement integration between GitHub repositories and Azure Pipelines
  • Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules
  • Develop pipelines by using YAML
  • Design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage pipelines
  • Develop and implement complex pipeline scenarios, such as hybrid pipelines, VM templates, and self-hosted runners or agents
  • Create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups
  • Design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML-based 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 that dependency deployments are reliably ordered
  • Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using load balancing, rolling deployments, and deployment slot usage and swap
  • Design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes
  • Design and implement a resiliency strategy for deployment
  • Implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager
  • Implement application deployment by using containers, binaries, and scripts
  • Implement a deployment that includes database tasks
• Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC)
  • Recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure
  • Implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure
  • 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 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
  • Optimize a pipeline for cost, time, performance, and reliability
  • Optimize pipeline concurrency for performance and cost
  • Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies
  • Migrate a pipeline from classic to YAML in Azure Pipelines

Develop a Security and Compliance Plan

• Design and implement authentication and authorization methods
  • Choose between Microsoft Entra service principals and managed identities for Azure resources (system-assigned and user-assigned)
  • Implement and manage GitHub authentication, including GitHub Apps, GITHUB_TOKEN, and personal access tokens
  • Implement and manage Azure DevOps service connections and personal access tokens
  • Design and implement permissions and roles in GitHub
  • Design and implement permissions and security groups in Azure DevOps
  • Recommend appropriate access levels, including stakeholder access in Azure DevOps and outside collaborator access in GitHub
  • Configure projects and teams in Azure DevOps
• Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation
  • Implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault
  • Implement and manage secrets and secretless authentication (for example, workload identity federation/OpenID Connect) in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
  • Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment, including Azure Pipelines secure files
  • Design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information
• Automate security and compliance scanning
  • Design a strategy for security and compliance scanning, including dependency, code, secret, and licensing scanning
  • Configure Microsoft Defender for Cloud DevOps Security
  • Configure GitHub Advanced Security for both GitHub and Azure DevOps
  • Integrate GitHub Advanced Security with Microsoft Defender for Cloud
  • Automate container scanning, including scanning container images and configuring an action to run CodeQL analysis in a container
  • Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Dependabot alerts

Implement an Instrumentation Strategy

• Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment
  • Configure Azure Monitor and Azure Monitor Logs to integrate with DevOps tools
  • Configure collection of telemetry by using Application Insights, VM Insights, Container Insights, Azure Monitor for Storage, and Azure Monitor for Networks
  • Configure monitoring in GitHub, including enabling insights and creating and configuring charts
  • Configure alerts for events in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
• Analyze metrics from instrumentation
  • Inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network
  • Analyze metrics by using collected telemetry, including usage and application performance
  • Inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights
  • Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries