Ok a short Blog post today as woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to do a little bit of last minute swotting for the AZ-400 exam, As I have already passed AZ-104, a pass of this exam would give me the DevOps Engineer Expert Credential.

Overall I found the exam to be quite varied covering a wide range of topics and positions with application development and CI/CD pipeline build and release process that covers a number of different concepts from code inspection to Build processes.

Being in the ‘Ops’ camp and not really doing a huge amount of development work over the last few years the concepts weren’t alien to me, but clearly the swotting I had done was invaluable to set the context to the new names of code inspection utilities and techniques that I simply didn’t have a daily working relationship with.

If you have been following my Blog over the last few months you will know that I have worked my way through pretty much all of the MS Learn Modules covering the AZ-400 learning path, as well as a number of Developer modules.

Check out the Learning Paths at the bottom of the exam registration page:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-400

Skills measured

• The content of this exam will be updated on November 24, 2020. Please download the exam skills outline below to see what will be changing.
• 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%)

The other thing that I have found invaluable in assisting with the study for this exam was to attend the DevOps Openhack with Microsoft, as well as creating my own Azure DevOps Organisation with a few projects to test and play with certain concepts.

So all in all, I am really happy to say it was a success! I got the pass!

I certainly didn’t find this the easiest of the Azure exams, but I felt this was by far the most interesting in terms of potential and how the DevOps people. process and technology mindset has the ability to radically change the way we all work and provide a platform for huge gains in productivity.

So over the coming months I will undoubtedly be working with more customers on their journey to utilise DevOps as well as the Azure DevOps technologies in order to assist solution design and deployment!

Really pleased to tick this exam off the list! Onwards and upwards…….. time to build up my developer hands on skills a tad mire, so Python, Terraform, IoT and Azure Developer here we go! Wish me luck!!!

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!