Objective domain: skills the exam measures

Syllabus

Skills measured

Configure processes and communications (10–15%)
Design and implement source control (15–20%)
Design and implement build and release pipelines (40–45%)
Develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%)
Implement an instrumentation strategy (10–15%)

Functional groups Configure processes and communications (10–15%)

Configure activity traceability and flow of work

Plan and implement a structure for the flow of work and feedback cycles
Identify appropriate metrics related to flow of work, such as cycle times, time to recovery, and lead time
Integrate pipelines with work item tracking tools, such as Azure DevOps and GitHub
Implement traceability policies decided by development
Integrate a repository with Azure Boards

Configure collaboration and communication

Design and implement source control (15–20%)

Design and implement a source control strategy

Design and implement an authentication strategy
Design a strategy for managing large files, including Git LFS and git-fat
Design a strategy for scaling and optimizing a Git repository, including Scalar and cross-repository sharing
Implement workflow hooks

Plan and implement branching strategies for the source code

Design a branch strategy, including trunk-based, feature branch, and release branch
Design and implement a pull request workflow by using branch policies and branch protections
Implement branch merging restrictions by using branch policies and branch protections

Configure and manage repositories

Integrate GitHub repositories with Azure Pipelines, one of the services in Azure DevOps
Configure permissions in the source control repository
Configure tags to organize the source control repository
Recover data by using Git commands
Purge data from source control

Design and implement build and release pipelines (40–45%)

Design and implement pipeline automation

Integrate pipelines with external tools, including dependency scanning, security scanning, and code coverage
Design and implement quality and release gates, including security and governance
Design integration of automated tests into a pipeline
Design and implement a comprehensive testing strategy
Implement orchestration of tools, such as GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines

Design and implement a package management strategy

Design a package management implementation that uses Azure Artifacts, GitHub Packages, NuGet, and npm
Design and implement package feeds, including upstream sources
Design and implement a dependency versioning strategy for code assets and packages, including semantic versioning and date-based

Design and implement pipelines

Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
Design and implement an agent infrastructure, including cost, tool selection, licenses, connectivity, and maintainability

Develop and implement pipeline trigger rules
Develop pipelines, including classic and YAML
Design and implement a strategy for job execution order, including parallelism and multi-stage
Develop complex pipeline scenarios, such as containerized agents and hybrid
Configure and manage self-hosted agents, including virtual machine (VM) templates and containerization
Create reusable pipeline elements, including YAML templates, task groups, variables, and variable groups
Design and implement checks and approvals by using YAML environments

Design and implement deployments

Design a deployment strategy, including blue/green, canary, ring, progressive exposure, feature flags, and A/B testing
Design a pipeline to ensure reliable order of dependency deployments
Plan for minimizing downtime during deployments by using VIP swap, load balancer, and rolling deployments
Design a hotfix path plan for responding to high-priority code fixes
Implement load balancing for deployment, including Azure Traffic Manager and the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service
Implement feature flags by using Azure App Configuration Feature Manager
Implement application deployment by using containers, binary, and scripts

Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC)

Recommend a configuration management technology for application infrastructure
Implement a configuration management strategy for application infrastructure, including IaC
Define an IaC strategy, including source control and automation of testing and deployment
Design and implement desired state configuration for environments, including Azure Automation State Configuration, Azure Resource Manager, Bicep, and Azure Policy guest configuration

Maintain pipelines

Monitor pipeline health, including failure rate, duration, and flaky tests
Optimize pipelines for cost, time, performance, and reliability
Analyze pipeline load to determine agent configuration and capacity
Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies

Develop a security and compliance plan (10–15%)

Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation

Implement and manage service connections
Implement and manage personal access tokens
Implement and manage secrets, keys, and certificates by using Azure Key Vault, GitHub secrets, and Azure Pipelines secrets
Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive files during deployment
Design pipelines to prevent leakage of sensitive information

Automate security and compliance scanning

Automate analysis of source code by using GitHub code scanning, GitHub secrets scanning, pipeline-based scans,and SonarQube
Automate security scanning, including container scanning and OWASP ZAP
Automate analysis of licensing, vulnerabilities, and versioning of open-source components by using WhiteSource Bolt and GitHub Dependency Scanning

Implement an instrumentation strategy (10–15%)

Configure and integrate monitoring by using Azure Monitor
Configure and integrate with monitoring tools, such as Azure Monitor and Application Insights
Manage access control to the monitoring platform
Configure alerts for pipeline events

Analyze metrics

Inspect distributed tracing by using Application Insights
Inspect application performance indicators
Inspect infrastructure performance indicators, including CPU, memory, disk, and network
Identify and monitor metrics for business value
Analyze usage metrics by using Application Insight
Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries