The booking portal of Nordlicht Reisen GmbH, a fictional travel agency, has a DevOps platform (lesson 7.1). This lesson looks back at the whole course. It brings no new material but arranges the familiar: by the areas of the AZ-400 exam that structured the course, with one sentence each on the decisions you can make there. After that, you make a gap map for yourself and see where you can go from here.
Prior knowledge: Everything in this lesson refers to lessons of this course; if you no longer remember a keyword, read it up there.
The exam areas and the lessons
The course follows Microsoft's study guide for the exam AZ-400, Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions, and its skills list. The study guide names five areas with shares of the exam. The shares are those of the skills list as it applied when the course was written; they change when Microsoft changes the list.
| Exam area | Share | Lessons of the course |
|---|---|---|
| Design and implement processes and communications | 10–15% | 1.1 to 1.4 |
| Design and implement a source control strategy | 10–15% | 2.1 to 2.4 |
| Design and implement build and release pipelines | 50–55% | 3.1 and 3.2 (packages), 4.1 to 4.14 (pipelines) |
| Develop a security and compliance plan | 10–15% | 5.1 to 5.4 |
| Implement an instrumentation strategy | 5–10% | 6.1 and 6.2 |
In addition come the two lessons of module D0 (accounts, map of the two worlds) and the final project, which connects all areas (7.1). Half of the exam is about pipelines; that is why packages and pipelines are two modules.
The skills, area by area
Each row is a skill from the list, worded as in the course, with the lessons in which you practice it.
Processes and communications
| Skill | Lesson |
|---|---|
| Structure the flow of work, GitHub Flow, feedback loops, notifications, issues | 1.1 |
| Track work with GitHub Projects and Azure Boards; traceability of source, bugs and quality | 1.1 |
| Connect Azure Boards to GitHub; connect Microsoft Teams; webhooks | 1.2 |
| Dashboards for lead time and time to restore; queries and metrics | 1.3 |
| Wikis and process diagrams (Markdown, Mermaid); release notes; documentation from the Git history | 1.4 |
Source control
| Skill | Lesson |
|---|---|
| Branching strategy (trunk, feature, release) | 2.1 |
| Pull request flow with branch policies and protection rules; merge restrictions | 2.2 |
| Large files (Git LFS); optimize large repositories (Scalar) | 2.3 |
| Permissions in the repository; tags; recover data; remove data from source control | 2.4 |
Packages and pipelines (build and release)
| Skill | Lesson |
|---|---|
| Choose a deployment automation solution | 0.2, 4.1 |
| Recommend package tools; feeds, views, upstream packages | 3.1 |
| Versioning of dependencies (SemVer, CalVer) and of pipeline artifacts | 3.2 |
| GitHub repository with Azure Pipelines; trigger rules | 4.1 |
| Design infrastructure for runners and agents (cost, tools, licenses, connectivity, maintainability) | 4.2 |
| Develop pipelines with YAML; order of jobs, parallelism, multi-stage pipelines | 4.3 |
| Reusable building blocks (templates, task groups, variables, variable groups) | 4.4 |
| Complex scenarios (hybrid, VM templates, self-hosted runners and agents) | 4.5 |
| Quality gates and release gates; test strategy; tests in the pipeline; coverage | 4.6 |
| Checks and approvals with YAML environments | 4.7 |
| Deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, ring, progressive, A/B); order of dependencies | 4.8 |
| Avoid downtime; hotfix path; resilience strategy | 4.9 |
| Feature flags with Azure App Configuration | 4.10 |
| Deploy applications (containers, binaries, scripts) and database tasks | 4.11 |
| Configuration management; strategy for infrastructure as code | 4.12 |
| Desired state; Azure Deployment Environments | 4.13 |
| Pipeline health; cost, time, performance, concurrency; retention; classic to YAML | 4.14 |
Security and compliance
| Skill | Lesson |
|---|---|
| Service principals and managed identities; GitHub sign-in; service connections and PATs | 5.1 |
| Permissions and roles in GitHub; security groups and access levels in Azure DevOps | 5.2 |
| Key Vault; secretless sign-in; secure files; avoid leaks | 5.3 |
| Checking strategy (dependencies, code, secrets, licenses); Defender for Cloud DevOps Security; GitHub Advanced Security; container scanning; Dependabot | 5.4 |
Instrumentation
| Skill | Lesson |
|---|---|
| Configure monitoring (Azure Monitor, Insights, GitHub insights, alerts for Actions and pipelines) | 6.1 |
| Evaluate metrics; distributed traces; simple KQL queries | 6.2 |