I’m delighted to say that I passed AZ-400 Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions on Monday November 23rd 2020. After MS-500 this was “fun” if such a thing can be said about a Microsoft Exam.

To prepare I did things quite informally in that I didn’t spend any money on courses or test exams but spent the time to do every learning path from the list on the syllabus page and the additional learning paths from the featured training for AZ-400 on the Microsoft Partner training page.

My method is to create a OneNote section for each exam I target and then I create lists of links to training along with an estimate of how long the training says it will take. The handy thing about the learning paths and profile page is that it counts down as you complete sections, meaning that it feels like you are making progress. When I feel I am on the home stretch I book the exam with however long I feel like I need. With this exam I’ve had the benefit this year of supporting an iOS mobile application development project on the Microsoft Platform which really helped me to understand the build and distribution aspects of that.

I make sure that I do every exercise I can and it was excellent to see how good GitHub is – I’m quite old and have worked with Microsoft technologies since Visual SourceSafe and before the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub. The training that the latter offers is really really good for a free to use resource.

Other than that my take on the exam is that it is a wide ranging topic so the exam is basically DevOps where one part of the solution is a Microsoft product. This means it pivots – you won’t necessarily be using a “Microsoft” build solution like Azure DevOps or GitHub to build your solution if you are developing in Visual Studio and so on.

I enjoyed the training for this exam as it is heavy on automation but also straight forward to follow along with the setup I have. I’m fortunate to have an Visual Studio subscription allocated to me as part of working for a Microsoft Partner and the tooling and Azure Subscription that come with this was essential in completing a number of the exercises on Microsoft Learn as you follow along in VS Code, GitHub, Azure DevOps and Azure in building solutions.

I’m up to date with my other Azure Exams so I also achieved an Expert Certification with this pass which is a nice feeling!