Overview
Azure DevOps remains the delivery backbone for a large share of enterprises, especially in the Microsoft ecosystem, and AZ-400 is how the industry credentials the people who run it. The trouble with the AZ-400 surface area is its size: it spans process, source control, pipelines, security, and operations, and courses that chase full coverage end up teaching all of it thinly.
This is a hands-on, practitioner course. It is grounded in the AZ-400 domains but follows a less-but-deeper philosophy: it concentrates on the delivery spine (work tracking, repos with real branch policy, YAML pipelines for CI, and multi-stage delivery with environments and approvals) and then builds outward to quality gates, security, and feedback from production. Every module includes a lab in a live Azure DevOps organization, and each module builds on the one before.
Who Should Attend
- Developers and DevOps engineers implementing delivery pipelines with Azure DevOps
- Teams standardizing on Azure DevOps for source control, builds, and releases
- Engineers preparing for the AZ-400 certification
Learners new to DevOps ideas themselves should take DevOps Foundations first.
Prerequisites
- Working experience with git and at least one programming language
- Basic Azure familiarity; Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) covers it
- Familiarity with DevOps concepts, per DevOps Foundations
What You Will Learn
- Configure Azure Boards to plan and track work without ceremony for its own sake
- Manage source control with Azure Repos, branch policies, and pull requests that protect quality
- Build continuous integration pipelines in YAML with Azure Pipelines
- Design multi-stage delivery with environments, approvals, and proper secret management
- Integrate testing, security scanning, and package management into the pipeline
- Close the loop with monitoring, and prepare with confidence for the AZ-400 exam
Course Outline
Day one: the delivery spine
- Organizing Work
- Organizations, projects, and Azure Boards: just enough process
- Work items, backlogs, and connecting work to code
- Lab: set up a project and trace a work item from backlog to branch
- Source Control That Protects Quality
- Branching strategies that scale, and ones that do not
- Branch policies, pull requests, and required reviewers
- Lab: enforce branch policies and take a change through a compliant pull request
- Continuous Integration with Azure Pipelines
- YAML pipelines: triggers, stages, jobs, and agents
- Building and testing on every change, with results people actually read
- Lab: build a YAML CI pipeline that blocks a failing change
Day two: delivery, quality, and feedback
- Multi-Stage Delivery
- Environments, approvals, and checks
- Variables, variable groups, and secrets done properly
- Lab: extend the pipeline to deploy through staging to production with an approval gate
- Quality and Security in the Pipeline
- Test integration and code coverage as gates
- Dependency scanning and secret detection
- Azure Artifacts: managing packages and feeds
- Lab: add quality and security gates that catch a planted vulnerability
- Feedback and the Exam
- Monitoring releases with Azure Monitor and Application Insights
- Reading delivery performance from Azure DevOps data
- Mapping what you have built to the AZ-400 domains, with a study plan
- Lab: wire release annotations into monitoring and work through exam-style questions
Extended Version
The three-day version keeps the same gradient and adds:
- Infrastructure as code in the pipeline, connecting to Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
- GitHub and Azure DevOps together: where Microsoft is heading, and how to span both
- Advanced deployment strategies: rings, feature flags, and progressive exposure
- A capstone: implement a complete, gated delivery pipeline for an application, followed by a full practice exam