Microsoft Build 2020: Book of News

Microsoft Build is annual and one of the biggest conference that always brings TONS of updates and announcements across the entire Microsoft technology stack with focus on developer tools, products and Azure cloud platform. The Build 2020 hadn’t been canceled and was transformed to a digital/online event that took place May 19-20.

Key news highlights (my favourite)
Official guide to the key event announcements

Passed Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400)

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

  1. You must either earn the Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Developer Associate certification
  2. You must have an active Azure DevOps account. The Azure Pipelines and Azure Repos are needed at least.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

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