Certified DevOps Engineer or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pipeline

After passing the Terraform Associate exam in May, I decided to keep the momentum going and aim for the AZ-400 — Microsoft's DevOps Engineer Expert certification. The exam is booked for August 10, which gives me roughly six weeks to not embarrass myself in front of Azure Pipelines.

Prerequisites: AZ-400 requires either AZ-104 to be completed first. I already have AZ-104, so that box is ticked — one less pipeline to configure.

What's actually on the exam?

The AZ-400 covers five domains. Think of it as the exam where Microsoft asks: "okay, you know Azure — but can you also make it all move automatically without setting things on fire?"

Domain	Weight
Configure processes and communications	~17%
Design and implement source control	~22%
Build and release pipelines	~26%
Security and compliance	~20%
Instrumentation	~15%

My study plan

Six weeks, three main resources:

Udemy Courses - Since Microsoft Learn — the official learning path - is surprisingly boring and long... I will go with Alan Rodrigues' course.

John Savill's YouTube content — his AZ-400 study cram is the closest thing to a cheat code that isn't actually cheating.

Practice exams — in the final two weeks. The goal isn't to memorize answers but to understand why the wrong answers are wrong. Will use MeasureUp for this.

Coming from an IaC background

My day-to-day already involves Git, OpenTofu, Azure DevOps, Kanban boards, Forgejo, Kubernetes and many other tools — so the DevOps concepts aren't alien. The tricky part will be translating that into Azure-native terminology...