CertPREP Courseware: Microsoft Designing and Implementing DevOps Solutions (AZ-400) — Self-paced, 180-Day access

• Skill 1.1: Configure activity traceability and flow of work (1 hour 12 minutes).
  • Plan and implement a structure for the flow of work and feedback cycles.
  • Identify appropriate metrics related to flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time.
  • Integrate Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions with work item tracking tools.
  • Implement traceability policies decided by development.
  • Integrate a repository with Azure Boards.
  
  


• Skill 1.2: Facilitate Communication and Collaboration (1 hour).
  • Communicate actionable information by using custom dashboards in Azure Boards.
  • Document a project by using tools, such as wikis and process diagrams.
  • Configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation.
  • Automate creation of documentation from Git history.
  • Configure notifications by using webhooks.

• Skill 2.1: Design and implement a source control strategy (1 hour).
  • Design and implement an authentication strategy.
  • 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.
  • Implement workflow hooks.


• Skill 2.2: Plan and implement branching strategies for the source code (36 minutes).
  • 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 protections.
  • Implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protections.


• Skill 2:3: Configure and manage repositories (1 hour).
  • Integrate GitHub repositories with Azure Pipelines.
  • Configure permissions in the source control repository.
  • Configure tags to organize the source control repository.
  • Recover data by using Git commands.
  • Purge data from source control.

• Skill 3.1: Design and implement pipeline automation (1 hour 12 minutes).
  • Integrate pipelines with external tools, including dependency scanning, security scanning, and code coverage.
  • Design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance.
  • Design integration of automated tests into pipelines.
  • 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.


• Skill 3.2: Design and implement a package management strategy (48 minutes).
  • Design a package management implementation that uses Azure Artifacts, GitHub Packages, NuGet, and npm.
  • Design and implement package feeds, including upstream sources.
  • Design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning and date-based.
  • Design and implement a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts.


• Skill 3.3: Design and implement pipelines (1 hour 48 minutes).
  • Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
  • Design and implement an agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability.
  • Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules.
  • Develop pipelines, including classic and YAML.
  • Design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage.
  • Develop complex pipeline scenarios, such as containerized agents and hybrid.
  • Configure and manage self-hosted agents, including virtual machine (VM) templates and containerization.
  • Create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups.
  • Design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML environments.


• Skill 3.4: Design and implement deployments (1 hour 24 minutes).
  • Design a deployment strategy, including blue/green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, feature flags, and A/B testing.
  • Design a pipeline to ensure reliable order of dependency deployments.
  • Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using virtual IP address (VIP) swap, load balancer, and rolling deployments.
  • Design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes.
  • Implement load balancing for deployment, including Azure Traffic Manager and the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service.
  • Implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager.
  • Implement application deployment by using containers, binary, and scripts.


• Skill 3.5: Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC) (1 hour)
  • Recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure.
  • Implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure, including IaC.
  • 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 Automanage Machine Configuration.
  • Design and implement Azure Deployment Environments for on-demand self-deployment.


• Skill 3.6: Maintain pipelines (48 minutes).
  • Monitor pipeline health, including failure rate, duration, and flaky tests.
  • Optimize pipelines for cost, time, performance, and reliability.
  • Analyze pipeline load to determine agent configuration and capacity.
  • Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies.

• Skill 4.1: Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation (1 hour).
  • Implement and manage service connections.
  • Implement and manage personal access tokens.
  • Implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault, GitHub secrets, and Azure Pipelines secrets.
  • Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment.
  • Design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information.


• Skill 4.2: Automate security and compliance scanning (36 minutes).
  • 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).
  • Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using Mend Bolt and GitHub Dependency Scanning.

• Skill 5.1: Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment (48 minutes).
  • Configure and integrate monitoring by using Azure Monitor.
  • Configure and integrate with monitoring tools, such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and the Prometheus managed service.
  • Manage access control to the monitoring platform.
  • Configure alerts for pipeline events.


• Skill 5.2: Analyze metrics (1 hour 12 minutes).
  • Inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights.
  • Inspect application performance indicators.
  • Inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network.
  • Identify and monitor metrics for business value.
  • Analyze usage metrics by using Application Insights.
  • Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries.

Student access for each license to the course content and resources for 6 months including:

• All text, video, and end of lesson questions
• Lab content (where available)
• Practice Test