AZ-400 Continuous Delivery 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which rolling deployment strategy in Azure Pipelines gradually replaces old instances with new ones without taking all instances offline?
- Recreate
- Rolling (Correct answer)
- Blue-green
- Shadow
Correct answer: Rolling
A rolling strategy updates a subset of instances at a time, reducing risk by keeping most of the fleet running the old version during the rollout.
Question 2: A pipeline must download a secure configuration file from Azure Key Vault at deploy time. Which integration approach is recommended?
- Store secrets in pipeline variables marked as secret
- Use the Azure Key Vault task to fetch secrets into pipeline variables (Correct answer)
- Hardcode the values in the YAML file
- Use a service principal token in a deployment script
Correct answer: Use the Azure Key Vault task to fetch secrets into pipeline variables
The Azure Key Vault task retrieves secrets at runtime and maps them to pipeline variables without exposing them in YAML.
Question 3: What does the 'maxParallel' property control in a rolling deployment strategy within a YAML pipeline?
- The number of agents to provision
- How many targets receive the new deployment simultaneously (Correct answer)
- The timeout for each deployment task
- The number of retry attempts on failure
Correct answer: How many targets receive the new deployment simultaneously
'maxParallel' limits how many deployment targets are updated at the same time during a rolling deployment.
Question 4: Which Azure service provides a fully managed Helm chart repository that integrates natively with Azure Pipelines for CD to AKS?
- Azure Blob Storage
- Azure Container Registry (OCI artifact support)
- Azure Artifacts (Correct answer)
- Azure File Share
Correct answer: Azure Artifacts
Azure Artifacts supports hosting Helm charts and integrates with pipelines, enabling versioned chart delivery to AKS clusters.
Question 5: A team needs to prevent deployments to production unless an Azure Monitor alert is in a healthy state. Which pipeline feature should they configure?
- Pre-deployment approval
- Azure Monitor release gate (Correct answer)
- Branch protection rule
- Retention policy
Correct answer: Azure Monitor release gate
The Azure Monitor release gate queries alert rules and blocks the deployment stage if any alerts are firing.
Question 6: In a canary deployment strategy, what determines the percentage of traffic routed to the new version initially?
- The number of pipeline agents
- Traffic routing rules configured in the load balancer or ingress controller (Correct answer)
- The artifact version number
- The number of work items linked to the release
Correct answer: Traffic routing rules configured in the load balancer or ingress controller
Canary traffic splitting is controlled by load balancer rules, ingress annotations, or feature flags — not by the pipeline itself.
Question 7: Which YAML keyword must be used to share output variables between stages in a multi-stage Azure Pipeline?
- env
- outputs
- stageDependencies (Correct answer)
- variables
Correct answer: stageDependencies
The 'stageDependencies' expression syntax reads output variables produced by jobs in a previous stage.
AZ-400 Continuous Delivery 3
Which rolling deployment strategy in Azure Pipelines gradually replaces old instances with new ones without taking all instances offline?