Tag: powershell

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.

Announcing my GitHub repositories

Howdy, I decided to share some scripts and configuration files via GitHub. This approach has many advantages – user-friendly code (easy to read, easy to use), you can commit changes via pull requests, easier to update the code, you can follow me to instantly receive updates.

PowerShell scripts to automate application deployments

PowerShell DSC scripts to automate software configurations

Terraform and Packer configurations

  • terraform-k8s-aks: automates Azure Kubernetes and Container Registry services deployment. See the blog post.
  • terraform-globalazure-2019: source code from my session at Global Azure BootCamp 2019 Russia. The main configuration file automates deployment of VMs, availability set, load balancer, NSGs and registers VMs with Azure DevOps Deployment Group to make possible CD.
  • packer-iis: packer sample json to create a custom image in Azure. See the blog post.

Azure and Kubernetes

Miscellaneous

I will keep this post updated. If new repos added, I’ll describe them here as well. Thanks for following. Cheers.