About This Study Plan

This 7-day study plan breaks the AZ-400 (Azure DevOps Engineer Expert) exam preparation into 4 focused study sessions with a total of 12 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 5 exam domains — Design and Implement Processes and Communications, Design and Implement a Source Control Strategy, Design and Implement Build and Release Pipelines, Develop a Security and Compliance Plan, Implement an Instrumentation Strategy — ensuring complete coverage of the exam blueprint. An intensive plan for experienced DevOps practitioners preparing for AZ-400 quickly.

4Study Sessions

12Total Tasks

5Domains Covered

Prerequisites

CI/CD and Azure DevOps experience
3-4 hours of study time per day

Study Schedule

Days 1-2Source Control & CI/CD

Study branching strategies and pull request workflows.
Design multi-stage YAML pipelines with templates.
Practice GitHub Actions workflow syntax and environments.

Days 3-4Containers, IaC & Release

Implement container build strategies and Helm deployments.
Study Bicep/Terraform in pipeline workflows.
Design release strategies: blue-green, canary, feature flags.

Days 5-6Security & Monitoring

Implement DevSecOps scanning in CI/CD pipelines.
Configure Azure Monitor, alerts, and dashboards.
Study SRE concepts: SLI, SLO, error budgets.

Day 7Mock Exam & Review

Take a full AZ-400 mock exam.
Review pipeline YAML patterns.
Focus on scenario-based decision making.

Study Tips

💡

Practice writing YAML pipelines from scratch.

💡

Understand the DevOps lifecycle end-to-end.

💡

Focus on security integration in CI/CD.

Recommended Azure Study Resources

Supplement this study plan with Microsoft Learn's free AZ-400 learning path, which provides interactive modules and sandboxed Azure environments. The Microsoft Virtual Training Days programme also offers free instructor-led sessions with a 50% exam discount voucher upon completion.