Microsoft - Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps

Curriculum

Module 1: 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

• Communicate actionable information by using custom dashboards in Azure DevOps
• Document a project by using tools, such as wikis and process diagrams
• Configure release documentation, including release notes and API documentation
• Automate creation of documentation from Git history
• Configure notifications by using webhooks

Module 2: 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

Module 3: 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 a versioning strategy for pipeline artifacts

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
• Analyse pipeline load to determine agent configuration and capacity
• Design and implement a retention strategy for pipeline artifacts and dependencies

Module 4: 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

Module 5: Implement an instrumentation strategy (10–15%)

Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment

• 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

Analyse 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
• Analyse usage metrics by using Application Insight
• Interrogate logs using basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries