AZ-400 — Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
Bootcamp Certificate Track
Live DevOps labs, CI/CD workshops, and pipeline reviews. Estimated effort: 100–140 hours.
🔗 Official Certification PageWho This Is For?
- Cloud and DevOps engineers
- Developers responsible for CI/CD and automation
- Platform and release engineers
What You'll Achieve
- End-to-end DevOps implementation skills
- Real CI/CD pipeline design experience
- Strong alignment between development, security, and operations
Full Curriculum Outline (Exam-Aligned)
Comprehensive coverage of all exam objectives with hands-on practice
Bootcamp Curriculum
6-week intensive program with hands-on labs and real-world projects
Week 1 — DevOps Processes, Flow of Work & Metrics
Skills Area: Design and implement processes and communications (10–15%)
What You'll Learn
- Design flow of work using GitHub Flow
- Implement feedback cycles with issues and notifications
- Integrate work tracking across GitHub Projects, Azure Boards, and Repositories
- Implement source, bug, and quality traceability
- Design DevOps metrics: Cycle time, Lead time, Time to recovery
- Metrics for planning, development, testing, security, delivery, and operations
- Project documentation using Markdown and Mermaid
- Team communication using webhooks and Microsoft Teams
Hands-On Labs
- Configure GitHub Flow for a real project
- Integrate Azure Boards / GitHub Projects with repositories
- Build a DevOps metrics dashboard
- Create documentation with Markdown and Mermaid diagrams
- Configure Teams notifications via webhooks
Week 2 — Source Control Strategy & Repository Management
Skills Area: Design and implement a source control strategy (10–15%)
What You'll Learn
- Branching strategies: Trunk-based development, Feature branches, Release branches
- Pull request workflows with branch policies
- Branch protections and merge restrictions
- Managing large files using Git LFS and git-fat
- Scaling Git repositories with Scalar and cross-repo sharing
- Repository permissions and access control
- Tagging strategies
- Recovering and removing data using Git commands
Hands-On Labs
- Implement trunk-based and feature-branch workflows
- Configure PR policies and branch protections
- Manage large files using Git LFS
- Recover and remove commits safely
- Configure repository permissions and tagging standards
Week 3 — CI Pipelines, Package Management & Testing
Skills Area: Design and implement build pipelines (part of 50–55%)
What You'll Learn
- Package management tools: GitHub Packages, Azure Artifacts
- Package feeds, views, and upstream sources
- Dependency versioning strategies: Semantic Versioning (SemVer), Calendar Versioning (CalVer)
- Pipeline artifact versioning
- Testing strategies: Local tests, Unit tests, Integration tests, Load tests
- Quality and release gates
- Code coverage analysis
Hands-On Labs
- Create package feeds using GitHub Packages / Azure Artifacts
- Implement versioning strategies in CI pipelines
- Build CI pipelines with automated tests
- Configure quality gates and code coverage
- Publish and consume pipeline artifacts
Week 4 — Release Pipelines, Deployments & Infrastructure as Code
Skills Area: Design and implement release pipelines (part of 50–55%)
What You'll Learn
- Deployment automation: GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines
- Runner and agent infrastructure: Hosted vs self-hosted, Cost and maintainability considerations
- YAML pipelines: Triggers, Multi-stage pipelines, Parallel execution
- Deployment strategies: Blue-green, Canary, Ring-based, Progressive exposure
- Downtime minimization: VIP swap, Load balancing, Deployment slots
- Hotfix path design
- Infrastructure as Code: ARM, Bicep, Desired State Configuration, Azure Deployment Environments
Hands-On Labs
- Build multi-stage YAML release pipelines
- Implement blue-green and canary deployments
- Deploy infrastructure using Bicep
- Implement feature flags with Azure App Configuration
- Design and test a hotfix deployment path
Week 5 — Security, Compliance & Secure Automation
Skills Area: Develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%)
What You'll Learn
- Authentication and authorization for pipelines: Service Principals, Managed Identities
- GitHub authentication: GitHub Apps, GITHUB_TOKEN, Personal Access Tokens
- Azure DevOps service connections
- Permissions and roles in GitHub and Azure DevOps
- Secrets and sensitive data management: Azure Key Vault, Secure files
- Security and compliance scanning: Dependency scanning, Secret scanning, License scanning
- GitHub Advanced Security
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud DevOps Security
- Container image scanning and Dependabot alerts
Hands-On Labs
- Secure pipelines using Managed Identity and Key Vault
- Configure GitHub Advanced Security
- Integrate Defender for Cloud DevOps Security
- Implement container scanning and CodeQL
- Secure secrets and sensitive files in pipelines
Week 6 — Instrumentation, Monitoring & Capstone Project
Skills Area: Implement an instrumentation strategy (5–10%)
What You'll Learn
- Azure Monitor and Log Analytics for DevOps
- Telemetry collection: Application Insights, VM Insights, Container Insights, Storage and Network Insights
- Monitoring GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
- Alerts for pipeline failures and security events
- Performance analysis (CPU, memory, disk, network)
- Distributed tracing
- Log analysis using Kusto Query Language (KQL)
Hands-On Labs
- Configure end-to-end monitoring for pipelines and workloads
- Create alerts for pipeline and deployment failures
- Analyze telemetry using Application Insights
- Query logs using KQL
Capstone Project
- Design and implement a full enterprise DevOps solution
- Source control strategy
- CI/CD pipelines
- Secure automation
- Monitoring and observability
- Architecture and pipeline review with instructor feedback
Certification Outcome
By completing this bootcamp, learners will be able to:
- Design and implement enterprise-grade DevOps solutions
- Operate secure, scalable CI/CD pipelines
- Confidently sit the AZ-400 certification exam
- Perform effectively in DevOps Engineer and Platform Engineer roles
Need a Custom Learning Path?
If you are new to cloud or DevOps, we strongly recommend starting with Cloud Foundation — Live Bootcamp before AZ-400.
You can book a free consultation to receive a personalized learning curriculum based on your experience.
Begin Your DevOps Transformation
This comprehensive bootcamp takes you from DevOps fundamentals to expert-level implementation with hands-on pipeline design and security practices.