Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert

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Exam at a Glance

AZ-400 measures whether you can do the day-to-day work of a DevOps engineer on Azure: designing the flow of work and source control, building and running pipelines in both Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions, securing the delivery process, and instrumenting what you ship.

 

What the Exam Covers

The exam has five domains with very uneven weights: build and release pipelines alone is about half the exam. The smaller domains still matter, but your hands-on time should go to pipelines, deployments and infrastructure as code first, and every domain expects both the GitHub and the Azure DevOps way.

 

Design and implement processes and communications — 10-15%

Flow of work including GitHub Flow, feedback cycles with GitHub Issues, work tracking across GitHub Projects, Azure Boards and repositories, traceability; dashboards and metrics such as cycle time, lead time and time to recovery; wikis with Markdown and Mermaid, release notes, webhooks, and Azure Boards, GitHub and Microsoft Teams integration.

 

Design and implement a source control strategy — 10-15%

Trunk-based, feature and release branch strategies, pull request workflows and merge restrictions with branch policies and branch protection rules; large files with Git LFS, scaling with Scalar, repository permissions and tags, and recovering or removing specific data with Git commands.

 

Design and implement build and release pipelines — 50-55%

Package management (GitHub Packages and Azure Artifacts, feeds and views, SemVer and CalVer); testing strategy (quality and release gates, test types, code coverage); pipeline design (GitHub Actions versus Azure Pipelines, runner and agent infrastructure, triggers, YAML, parallelism and multi-stage pipelines, reusable templates, checks and approvals with environments); deployments (blue-green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, A/B testing, feature flags with Azure App Configuration, rolling deployments and slot swaps, database deployments); infrastructure as code (Azure Automation State Configuration, ARM, Bicep, Azure Machine Configuration, Azure Deployment Environments); and maintaining pipelines (health, cost, retention, classic-to-YAML migration).

 

Develop a security and compliance plan — 10-15%

Service principals versus managed identities, GitHub Apps, GITHUB_TOKEN and personal access tokens, Azure DevOps service connections, permissions and security groups; secrets in Azure Key Vault, secretless authentication with workload identity federation and OpenID Connect; dependency, code, secret and licensing scanning, Microsoft Defender for Cloud DevOps Security, GitHub Advanced Security for GitHub and for Azure DevOps, CodeQL, and Dependabot alerts.

 

Implement an instrumentation strategy — 5-10%

Azure Monitor and Azure Monitor Logs integration with DevOps tools, telemetry from Application Insights, VM Insights and Container Insights, GitHub insights, alerts for GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines; analyzing performance, distributed tracing, and basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries.

 

The full bullet-level list lives in the official study guide. Treat it as your checklist:

The Official AZ-400 Study Guide

 

How This Maps to CertiAce Practice Modules

The CertiAce question bank is organized by the eight learning paths of the AZ-400 course, so you can drill each area in isolation; the heavyweight pipelines domain is spread over five of them:

 

Where AZ-400 Fits

AZ-400 is not an entry point: to become a Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert you must hold a qualifying associate certification in addition to passing AZ-400, and for candidates starting today that is Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (exam AZ-104). Whichever order you take the exams in, the certification is issued only once you hold both. Taking AZ-104 first is the sensible route: it builds the Azure administration foundation that AZ-400 questions are judged against.

Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert

 

Before You Start

The exam assumes you already administer or develop on Azure and have shipped software through a pipeline. Check yourself against this table. Anything unfamiliar is where to start:

 

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Step-by-Step Study Plan

How long you need depends on where you start. Treat these estimates as planning guidance and adjust them to your starting knowledge and weekly study hours:

 

Step 1: Read the Official Study Guide

Skim the full skills-measured list once, and mark every bullet you could not explain to a colleague. That marked-up list is your personal syllabus: everything else in this plan exists to clear it. Many bullets pair a GitHub tool with an Azure DevOps tool: clear a bullet only when you can do it both ways.

The Official Study Guide

 

Step 2: Schedule Your Exam

Choose a realistic target date after reviewing the skills list and your available study time. A date on the calendar turns studying into a countdown, so pick one using the prep-time table above and plan backwards from it. If you do not hold AZ-104 yet, put it on the same calendar.

Certification and Exam Details Page

 

Step 3: Work Through the Official Learning Path

Complete the eight AZ-400 learning paths on Microsoft Learn. Take notes on concepts you cannot explain in simple terms, and flag anything that needs hands-on practice. You will come back to those in Step 5.

Official Learning Path Course Page

 

Step 4: Watch a Full Video Course

Microsoft Learn publishes its own episode-by-episode video walkthrough of the AZ-400 course: 26 videos that follow the learning paths in order. Watch it end to end. Treat it as both learning and revision: a second pass over your weak topics later is much faster and surprisingly effective.

AZ-400: Design and Implement Microsoft DevOps solutions

 

Step 5: Get Hands-On Practice

AZ-400 rewards real experience designing and running delivery pipelines: the questions test whether you recognize the right pattern, and that intuition only comes from building the flow yourself. Both toolsets have free tiers: Azure DevOps Services for the first five users, GitHub Free with 2,000 Actions minutes a month. Build one real application from work item to production, and make sure you personally touch:

• A multi-stage YAML pipeline in Azure Pipelines and the equivalent GitHub Actions workflow
• Reusable templates, variable groups, and environments with approvals and checks
• A slot swap, a canary or blue-green rollout, and a feature flag in Azure App Configuration
• Publishing and consuming a package through Azure Artifacts feeds and views
• Workload identity federation to Azure and a secret pulled from Azure Key Vault
• Secret scanning, code scanning with CodeQL, and Dependabot on a repository
• Bicep deployed from the pipeline, then Application Insights queried with KQL

The official lab repository walks through fifteen such exercises step by step.

Official AZ-400 Lab Exercises

 

Step 6: Benchmark Your Knowledge

Use CertiAce to benchmark your readiness module by module. The practice modules map to the exam domains as shown above, so use the module mapping and the topics behind your missed questions to identify the skills-measured areas to revisit. Microsoft also offers a free official practice assessment (in the resources below). Aim for consistent performance across every module, not one lucky high score; if a topic is unstable, go back to learning plus hands-on practice.

CertiAce AZ-400 Exam Practice

 

Step 7: Take the Exam

The day before, review only your weak topics: no brand-new material. On exam day, read each question for what it is truly asking, eliminate wrong options first, and watch for wording that implies constraints such as least privilege, zero downtime, cost, or auditability. Check whether the scenario is GitHub, Azure DevOps, or hybrid before you pick a tool.

Worth knowing before you sit down:

• Microsoft Learn is available during the exam in a split screen. Use it to check details you genuinely need: the timer keeps running, and the exam is deliberately too long to look up every answer. Browsing is limited to Microsoft Learn itself (no Q&A, practice assessments, or profile), and personal notes and other websites are unavailable.
• You can take unscheduled breaks, but the clock keeps running and you cannot return to questions you already saw.
• Case studies lock when you leave them: finish each one before moving on, because you cannot revisit its questions afterwards.
• Try the exam sandbox beforehand so the question formats and interface hold no surprises: Exam Sandbox

 

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Additional Learning Resources