Introduction

  • 4 minutes

"DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users."
- Donovan Brown in What is DevOps?

Real-world DevOps transformation success

Consider Netflix's journey: they transformed from a DVD-by-mail service to a global streaming platform by adopting DevOps practices. They dramatically reduced deployment times and achieved multiple daily deployments while maintaining high system availability. This transformation enabled them to respond rapidly to market demands and customer feedback.

Similarly, Microsoft's own transformation journey demonstrates the power of DevOps. Microsoft moved from traditional waterfall development with multi-year release cycles to continuous deployment, now releasing updates to Azure services multiple times per day. This cultural and technical transformation enabled Microsoft to become one of the world's leading cloud providers.

Your DevOps learning journey

The DevOps learning paths will help you prepare for a comprehensive DevOps transformation. You'll learn the main characteristics of the DevOps process, tools, and people involved during the lifecycle. This module also prepares you for the Microsoft DevOps Solution certification exam (AZ-400). The content includes real-world scenarios, hands-on exercises, reference links, interactive assessments, and practical templates you can use in your organization.

What you learn in this comprehensive journey

By completing this module, you'll master the foundational concepts needed to lead or participate in a DevOps transformation:

  • Strategic Planning: How to plan for DevOps transformation and avoid common pitfalls.
  • Source Control: Use and scale Git for enterprise environments.
  • Team Collaboration: Combine artifacts and design effective dependency management strategies.
  • Security Integration: Manage secrets and implement security throughout the pipeline.
  • Automation Excellence: Implement continuous integration and container-build strategies.
  • Delivery Optimization: Design release strategies and deployment patterns.
  • Feedback Loops: Set up monitoring and optimize feedback mechanisms.
  • Cultural Transformation: Build cross-functional teams and establish shared goals.

Self-assessment: Are you ready?

Before starting your DevOps journey, evaluate your current state:

Technical Readiness

  • Do you have experience with version control systems?
  • Are you familiar with basic cloud computing concepts?
  • Do you understand software development lifecycles?

Organizational Readiness

  • Does your organization support cultural change?
  • Are stakeholders committed to DevOps transformation?
  • Do you have executive sponsorship for change initiatives?

Personal Readiness

  • Are you prepared to learn new tools and processes?
  • Can you dedicate time for hands-on practice?
  • Are you ready to champion change in your organization?

If you answered "yes" to most questions, you're ready to begin. If not, consider addressing these areas first.

Plan before you act. This module will help you understand what DevOps is and how to plan for a DevOps transformation journey with practical, actionable guidance.

What is the DevOps transformation journey?

The DevOps transformation journey is a comprehensive series of 8 learning paths that will take you from intermediate DevOps practices to advanced implementation. This journey familiarizes you with both Azure DevOps and GitHub platforms, their services, features, and integrations with third-party tools to support your complete DevOps process.

Industry impact and career benefits

DevOps skills are highly valued in the technology industry as organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native practices and continuous delivery models. The skills you'll develop are in high demand across industries as organizations seek to:

  • Accelerate time-to-market for new features and products
  • Reduce deployment failures through improved automation and testing
  • Improve system reliability and customer satisfaction
  • Enable rapid innovation and competitive advantage

Why should I take the DevOps learning path?

People in these modules are interested in designing and implementing DevOps processes. Also, they're preparing for the AZ-400 - Design and Implement Microsoft DevOps Solutions certification exam.

The certification exam is for DevOps professionals. Combine people, processes, and technologies to continuously deliver valuable products and services that meet end-user needs and business goals. DevOps professionals streamline delivery by optimizing practices, improving communications and collaboration, and creating automation.

They design and implement application code and infrastructure strategies that allow continuous integration, testing, delivery, monitoring, and feedback.

Exam candidates must be proficient with Agile practices. They must be familiar with Azure administration, development and experts in at least one of these areas.

DevOps professionals must design and implement DevOps practices for version control, compliance, infrastructure as code, configuration management, build, release, and testing-using Azure technologies.

There are five domain areas.

AZ-400 Domain Area Weight
Design and implement processes and communications. 11%
Design and implement a source control strategy. 13%
Design and implement build and release pipelines. 51%
Develop a security and compliance plan. 16%
Implement an instrumentation strategy. 9%

Learning objectives

After completing this series, students and professionals can:

  • Design and implement traceability and flow of work.
  • Design and implement appropriate metrics and queries for DevOps.
  • Configure collaboration and communication.
  • Design and implement branching strategies for the source code.
  • Configure and manage repositories.
  • Design and implement a package management strategy.
  • Design and implement a testing strategy for pipelines.
  • Design and implement pipelines.
  • Design and implement deployments.
  • Design and implement infrastructure as code (IaC).
  • Maintain pipelines.
  • Design and implement authentication and authorization methods.
  • Design and implement a strategy for managing sensitive information in automation.
  • Automate security and compliance scanning.
  • Configure monitoring for a DevOps environment.
  • Analyze metrics from instrumentation.

Prerequisites

Successful learners will have prior knowledge and understanding of the following:

  • Cloud computing concepts include understanding PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS implementations.
  • Azure administration and Azure development with proven expertise in at least one of these areas.
  • Foundational DevOps concepts, including version control, Agile software development, and core software development principles. It would be helpful to have experience in an organization that delivers software.

If you're new to DevOps, consider taking the:

If you're new to Azure and cloud computing, consider one of the following resources:

If you're new to Azure Administration, consider taking the:

If you're new to Azure Developer, consider taking the:

You must create an Azure DevOps Organization for some exercises. If you don't have it yet, see the following:

You must create a GitHub account at GitHub.com for some exercises. If you don't have it yet, see the following: