AZ-400 Release Management 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Azure Pipelines artifact type allows a release pipeline to consume packages published to Azure Artifacts feeds?
- GitHub artifact
- Azure Artifacts artifact (Correct answer)
- Pipeline artifact
- Container artifact
Correct answer: Azure Artifacts artifact
The Azure Artifacts artifact source type links a release pipeline to a specific feed and package, enabling versioned package consumption in deployments.
Question 2: A DevOps engineer wants to deploy an application to Azure App Service slots and then swap slots with zero downtime. Which task in Azure Pipelines performs the slot swap?
- Azure App Service Deploy
- Azure App Service Manage (Correct answer)
- Azure Web App task
- Azure CLI task with az webapp swap
Correct answer: Azure App Service Manage
The 'Azure App Service Manage' task includes a slot swap action that swaps staging and production slots with near-zero downtime.
Question 3: What is the primary purpose of using infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like ARM templates or Bicep within a release pipeline?
- To generate test reports automatically
- To provision and configure Azure resources consistently as part of the deployment (Correct answer)
- To monitor application performance post-release
- To manage source control branching strategies
Correct answer: To provision and configure Azure resources consistently as part of the deployment
IaC tools embedded in release pipelines ensure target infrastructure is provisioned or updated to a desired state before or during application deployment.
Question 4: In a release pipeline, which option ensures that only a specific build branch (e.g., 'main') triggers a continuous deployment?
- Stage filters
- Artifact filters / Branch filters (Correct answer)
- Agent pool conditions
- Deployment group filters
Correct answer: Artifact filters / Branch filters
Artifact filters (also called branch filters) in the continuous deployment trigger restrict automatic releases to artifacts built from specified branches.
Question 5: Which Azure service should a DevOps engineer integrate with a release pipeline gate to query the health of an external REST API before allowing deployment to proceed?
- Azure Monitor alerts
- Invoke REST API gate (Correct answer)
- Application Insights availability test
- Service connection health check
Correct answer: Invoke REST API gate
The 'Invoke REST API' gate calls an external HTTP endpoint and evaluates the response, allowing or blocking the release based on the result.
Question 6: A release pipeline needs to deploy a containerized application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Which deployment strategy in AKS ensures that new pods replace old ones gradually while maintaining availability?
- Recreate strategy
- Rolling update strategy (Correct answer)
- Blue-green strategy
- Canary strategy
Correct answer: Rolling update strategy
Kubernetes rolling update strategy incrementally replaces old pods with new ones, maintaining a configurable minimum number of available pods throughout the update.
Question 7: When configuring a multi-stage Azure release pipeline, which setting controls whether a stage automatically deploys when the previous stage succeeds?
- Continuous deployment trigger on the artifact
- Pre-deployment condition set to 'After stage' (Correct answer)
- Post-deployment gate on the previous stage
- Pipeline-level deployment authorization
Correct answer: Pre-deployment condition set to 'After stage'
Setting the pre-deployment condition to 'After stage' on a downstream stage causes it to automatically trigger when the specified upstream stage completes successfully.
AZ-400 Release Management 3
Which Azure Pipelines artifact type allows a release pipeline to consume packages published to Azure Artifacts feeds?