Azure, the world’s 2nd largest Cloud Service Provider, offers you certification for different domains to help its customers using its services, the advantage of its cutting-edge technologies and features. DevOps is a methodology for building and deploying software. It enhances the overall Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) by bringing Development and the Operations team together on a single platform and emphasizing automation to bring down the error by a huge margin. Earlier Microsoft had these services under one roof named Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS). Now they have rebranded it as Microsoft Azure DevOps Services and divided VSTS into five distinct services. They have both cloud offerings and server-side that companies can use to meet their requirements. In this article, we will discuss everything related to Azure DevOps certification in detail.
What is Azure DevOps Certification?
Azure offers you various role-based certifications to help you validate your expertise in working with the domain using the Azure platform. There is a certification for each role like Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Developer, Administrator, Security Engineer, Solutions Architect, AI Engineer, Functional Consultant, and DevOps Engineer. Here we will discuss Azure’s DevOps Certification in Zurich Engineer Expert-level Certification or AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions.
Through this certification exam, you can validate your subject matter expertise and the ability to work with people, processes, and technology in continuously delivering business value.
Let’s talk about AZ-400
AZ-400 or Azure DevOps Engineer Expert Certification is a role-based certification to validate DevOps professional’s experience in handling people, technology, and processes to generate business value through goods and services to meet end-user demand.
If you pass this certification exam, you must be able to design and implement strategies for collaboration, code, source control, compliance, security infrastructure, continuous integration, delivery, testing, monitoring, and feedback.
There is one prerequisite for this exam that is you must be an expert in either Azure administration or development, through Azure Associate level certification. You can take up Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) or Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204) to attend the Azure-400 certification exam.
If you are a beginner to Azure you can become an Azure Certified Azure DevOps Engineer Expert by taking up Fundamental-level certification Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals which will help you master fundamentals.
Check this tutorial on Azure DevOps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WlDQakFAwE
Skills Measured in AZ-400 exam:
Several skills are measured in a candidate and checked whether he/she can help organizations that hire them. These skills are mentioned here for your reference:
Form an Instrumentation Strategy (5-10%)
- Design and execute logging
- Integrate logging and monitoring solutions
- Compose and implement telemetry
Develop a strategy for Compliance and Security (10-15%)
- Design strategies for authorization and authentication
- Design fine-tuned Information Management strategies
- Configure security and compliance
- Plot Government Enforcement mechanisms
Managing Source Control (10-15%)
- Develop improved strategies for Source Control
- Unite tools for source control
- Put together repositories
- Design and execute branching strategies for the source code
Produce Site Reliability Engineering strategies (5-10%)
- Generate a failure prediction strategy
- Design and implement a health check
- Develop an actionable alerting strategy
Promote collaboration and communication (10-15%)
- Create DevOps process documentation
- Communicate various information like deployment and release information to your key business stakeholders
- Keep your team members informed by automating communication
Determine and execute Continuous Integration (20-25%)
- Design a build automation
- Create package management strategies
- Sketch application infrastructure management strategies
- Execute and maintain build strategies
- Devise a process for standardizing builds in the entire organization
Establish and achieve a Continuous Delivery and Release Management strategy (10-15%)
- Generate deployment scripts and templates
- Implement an orchestration automation solution
- Plan the deployment environment strategy
More info on AZ-400
The duration of the exam is 150-210 minutes, with the number of questions to be between 40 to 60. You must score 700 out of 1000 total to be awarded the certification. The set registration amount varies with countries. In the US, it is USD 165, and in India, it is INR 4,800. The exam is available in English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Talking about the validity, Microsoft has stated that starting from June 2021, all role-based certifications will be valid for one year, and professionals must pass an exam on Microsoft Learn, which is free of cost. Microsoft has an annual procedure that renews the validity of Microsoft Certifications.
Things you must know before registering for AZ-400:
You must be capable of using Azure technology for planning and executing DevOps practices for configuration management, version control, release, build compliance, and testing. If you know Agile, it’s an advantage. And the last thing you must also be an expert in conducting smooth implementation by automating several processes, improving procedures, incorporating program code, and infrastructure techniques.
