Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert
Validates expertise in designing and implementing DevOps practices for continuous integration, delivery, and security on Azure using GitHub and Azure DevOps. This expert-level certification covers designing processes and communications with work tracking and collaboration tools, implementing source control strategies with branching and repository management, designing build and release pipelines including package management, testing strategies, IaC with ARM/Bicep, and deployment strategies, developing security and compliance plans with GitHub Advanced Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud DevOps, and implementing instrumentation with Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and KQL. Requires experience both administering and developing in Azure.
Exam domains
- Design and implement build and release pipelines54%
Manage packages with GitHub Packages and Azure Artifacts, design testing and quality gates with code coverage, build YAML pipelines on GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines, implement blue-green, canary, ring, feature-flag, and A/B deployment strategies, and define infrastructure as code with ARM, Bicep, Azure Machine Configuration, and Azure Deployment Environments.
- Develop a security and compliance plan13%
Configure authentication using Microsoft Entra service principals, managed identities, GitHub Apps, GITHUB_TOKEN, personal access tokens, and Azure DevOps service connections; manage secrets and certificates with Azure Key Vault and OIDC workload identity federation; and automate dependency, code, secret, and license scanning with GitHub Advanced Security, Defender for Cloud DevOps Security, and Dependabot.
- Design and implement a source control strategy13%
Choose trunk-based, feature-branch, or release-branch strategies; enforce pull-request workflows with branch policies and protection rules; and manage large files, repository scaling, permissions, tags, and data recovery in Git.
- Design and implement processes and communications
Sources
Questions are grounded in 100 references from official and authoritative materials.
- Pipeline deployment approvals - Azure Pipelines | Microsoft Learn
- Connect an Azure Boards or Azure DevOps project to a GitHub repository - Azure Boards | Microsoft Learn
- Azure Key Vault Keys, Secrets, and Certificates Overview | Microsoft Learn
- Secure files for Azure Pipelines - Azure Pipelines | Microsoft Learn