AZ-400

AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert Certification Guide

What Microsoft's AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert exam covers, why pipelines carry half the marks, who it is for, and how to prepare for it.

By Code Nexus team · 5 min read · Published 2026-09-25 · Updated 2026-09-29 · Reviewed by Code Nexus team

Official exam page

A feature needs a repeatable way to reach users, with checks and a recovery route. AZ-400, Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions, assesses that delivery work. This guide explains the exam and the additional requirements for the DevOps Engineer Expert credential. It is the delivery stage of our certification roadmap; exam topics come from Microsoft's study guide.

What is the AZ-400 certification?

Microsoft describes the DevOps engineer as a developer or infrastructure administrator who also has subject matter expertise in working with people, processes and products to enable continuous delivery of value. The responsibilities include delivering Microsoft DevOps solutions that provide continuous security, integration, testing, delivery, deployment, monitoring and feedback, and designing the flow of work, collaboration, communication, source control and automation.

You work with developers, reliability engineers, administrators and security engineers. Microsoft expects experience with Azure, GitHub and Azure DevOps. To earn the DevOps Engineer Expert certification, you must also hold Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Developer Associate. That credential requirement is separate from the AZ-400 exam itself; check Microsoft's certification page before planning your route.

For an AI engineer, this is the exam that covers shipping an AI feature safely, including the pipelines that test and release it.

What the exam looks like

• Passing score: 700 or greater, on a scaled score.
• Skills outline: applies as of July 27, 2026.
• Renewal: Microsoft states that expert certifications expire annually and can be renewed with a free online assessment.
• Question count, time and price: not stated in the study guide, so check the exam page.
• Practice: Microsoft links a free practice assessment from the study guide.
• Requirements to earn the certification: pass AZ-400 and hold Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Developer Associate. The earlier fundamentals exams in this roadmap do not replace that requirement.

What AZ-400 teaches

The outline has five areas.

Pipelines are more than half the exam. Inside that area the outline covers package feeds and versioning; quality and release gates; GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines; YAML, triggers, stages, templates and variables; deployment strategies such as blue-green, canary and ring; infrastructure as code; and maintaining pipelines for cost and reliability.

What people underestimate

• Deployment strategies. Knowing which of blue-green, canary, ring and feature flags fits a situation.
• Two toolchains. The outline expects you to work in both GitHub and Azure DevOps.
• Secretless authentication. Workload identity federation and OpenID Connect instead of stored secrets.
• Security scanning. Dependency, code, secret and licence scanning, and where each sits in a pipeline.
• Metrics. Cycle time, lead time and time to recovery, and what they tell you.

Who AZ-400 is for

• Developers who want to own delivery, not only code.
• Infrastructure and cloud administrators who want to automate what they do by hand.
• Platform and site reliability engineers designing delivery for a team.
• Experienced learners who have worked through AZ-900, GH-900 and container skills.

If you are new to any of those, work through the earlier exams first. This one assumes real experience.

The benefits

• It covers the whole delivery lifecycle, from a work item to a monitored release.
• It emphasises safety. Gates, approvals, scanning and rollback are central.
• It ties the toolchain together. Source control, pipelines, security and monitoring are examined as one system.
• It reflects how AI features ship, since model and prompt changes need the same testing and release discipline.

Is there demand for the skill?

The Linux Foundation's 2022 Open Source Jobs Report found that 69% of employers were seeking hires with cloud and container skills, and that 93% reported difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills. That is a 2022 snapshot of the general market, and it does not measure demand for AZ-400 itself.

We have not found reliable evidence that employers require AZ-400 by name. Because it is expert-level and expires yearly, its value is greatest for people who already work in Azure DevOps and want a way to keep their skills current.

How Code Nexus prepares you for AZ-400

Seven episodes cover the exam, taught through the team that runs the fictional company's support service, and a final episode ties everything together.

• Episode 57, Stop Deploying by Memory covers branch protection, required reviews and status checks.
• Episode 58, From Commit to Candidate covers pipeline stages that stop at the first failure.
• Episode 59, The Environment Is Part of the Code covers infrastructure as code and environment drift.
• Episode 60, The Security Gate Says No covers security and compliance gates.
• Episode 61, The Tests Passed. The AI Got Worse. covers separate gates, including AI-quality evaluation.
• Episode 62, Creator Night: The Feed Is Failing and Episode 63, Creator Night: The Bill and the Breach cover incident response, monitoring and containment.
• Episode 64, You Are the Engineer is the season finale, where you own a recommendation end to end.

The episodes simulate a delivery pipeline and name the real GitHub and Azure DevOps tools the exam uses. It is not your own organisation, so practise in a free GitHub account and an Azure DevOps organisation alongside it. See the curriculum.

Code Nexus prepares you for the exam. Microsoft delivers it and issues the certification.

A study plan

1. Read the outline on the study guide and grade yourself on every bullet.
2. Put most of your time into pipelines. Build one in GitHub Actions and one in Azure Pipelines.
3. Add gates: a test, a security scan and an approval before deployment.
4. Practise a deployment strategy: deploy a canary and then roll it back.
5. Replace one stored secret with secretless authentication.
6. Query some logs with a basic KQL query.
7. Take the practice assessment and review every miss.

What to do next

AZ-400 is the last exam on the certification roadmap. Revisit KCNA if container platforms are still new, and read why practice beats passive study for how to keep skills sharp between annual renewals.

Ready to start? Create a free account and begin at Episode 1.

Code Nexus is not affiliated with Microsoft. Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions and its badge are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Code Nexus prepares you for the exam; Microsoft issues the certification.