Today I have finished my Azure certification path by successfully passing the AZ-400: Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions exam. This exam measures your ability to accomplish the following technical tasks: design a DevOps strategy, implement DevOps development processes, implement continuous integration, continuous delivery, dependency management, application infrastructure, and continuous feedback.
The exam consists of 2 case studies, 12 lab tasks, 42 test questions that must be answered in 180 minutes. I had two lab tasks that couldn’t be finished because of Azure environment issues (exam’s account didn’t have required permissions on Azure resources to complete certain sub-tasks). Fortunately, I was pretty sure for overall result and, after speaking with proctor, decided to jump into the next exam’s sections.
How to prepare
- You must either earn the Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Developer Associate certification
- You must have an active Azure DevOps account. The Azure Pipelines and Azure Repos are needed at least.
- Check out the free Azure/DevOps training courses (AZ-400 OpenEDX that’s based on MCT training guides and AzureDevOps Labs). In addition, there are a lot of videos at Pluralsight for getting started with Azure DevOps and understand DevOps principles.
- The labs are all about Azure Services (IaaS/PaaS/IaC), so you must know how to prepare environments for CD, environment types and differences between them, make IaC, understand security options for each Azure resource, CI/CD. Also, I was pretty surprised to see the lab tasks to be completed on localhost file system before pushing the code to Azure.
- The certification will be valid only for 2 years, so keep learning and practice every day! I wish you good luck on the exam and may the force be with you.
UseIT | Roman Levchenko 