The Microsoft AZ-400 Exam (Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions) is the next certification I am going to be aiming for. The exam information can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-400

This will play its part on the pathway to the Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer Expert Certification and will give me a depth of knowledge across the Microsoft DevOps architecture!

The Microsoft Learn materials can be found structured as 6 discrete Learning Pathways (of which I am aiming to complete over the coming days) this blog post is the chronicle of my studies on the Learning Pathway:

• AZ-400 Develop a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategy

This pathway is structured into 8 modules of which I have completed:

• Introduction to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Improve incident response with alerting on Azure
• Capture Web Application Logs with App Service Diagnostics Logging
• Manage site reliability
• Scale your cloud resources with elasticity
• Build applications on the cloud
• Troubleshoot inbound network connectivity for Azure Load Balancer
• Monitor the health of your Azure virtual machine by using Azure Metrics Explorer and metric alerts

This Learning Pathway discusses the role of a SRE and how they fit within a DevOps culture. It describes techniques with alerting and the differences between alerting on metrics vs logging data. From here the learning path looks into building out an application, how to scale out or up and what the differences are, what should be monitored and how, and understanding how some key Azure infrastructure such as a Load Balancer can be configured and how it carrys out its primary funciton.

The general theme of this learning path is how to ensure an application is available to service requests for the correct amount of time that is valuable to a business. Any remaining time should be spent making the application better!

Skills measured in the AZ-400 exam:

• The content of this exam was updated on June 15, 2020. Please download the exam skills outline below to see what changed.
• Develop an instrumentation strategy (5-10%)
• Develop a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategy (5-10%)
• Develop a security and compliance plan (10-15%)
• Manage source control (10-15%)
• Facilitate communication and collaboration (10-15%)
• Define and implement continuous integration (20-25%)
• Define and implement a continuous delivery and release management strategy (10-15%)

100DaysOfCloud Overview

My Main ReadMe Page is all set up with a bit about me!

The guys at 100DaysofCloud have set up the GitHub repo to be cloned and also have a great repo containing ideas and areas to collaborate on: https://github.com/100DaysOfCloud/100DaysOfCloudIdeas

My Github Journey tracker can be found here: https://github.com/jonnychipz/100DaysOfCloud

Please Watch/Star my repo and feel free to comment of contribute to anything I push! I really look forward to hearing from anyone who is going to jump on the journey around the same time as me! Lets see where I get to in 100 days!

I would encourage others to jump on this journey, I’m not sure that I will be able to commit every day for 100 days, but as long as I can complete 100 days that will be great!