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:

Microsoft Learn — the official learning path is surprisingly good and free...

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.

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...