I. Overview:

This course provides the knowledge and skills to design and implement DevOps processes and practices. Students will learn how to plan for DevOps, use source control, scale Git for an enterprise, consolidate artifacts, design a dependency management strategy, manage secrets, implement continuous integration, implement a container build strategy, design a release strategy, set up a release management workflow, implement a deployment pattern, and optimize feedback mechanisms.

II. Duration: 32 hours (4 days)

III. Intended Audience:

Students in this course are interested in designing and implementing DevOps processes or in passing the Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions certification exam.

IV. Prerequisites:

• Familiarity with Azure administration or Azure development
• Understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC)
• Experience with version control systems, especially Git
• Basic understanding of DevOps concepts and practices
• Familiarity with cloud computing concepts and core Azure services
• Basic understanding of CI/CD and automation concepts
• General awareness of application security fundamentals.

V. Course outlines:

1. Development for Enterprise DevOps

• Introduction to DevOps: This module explores the fundamental concepts organizations need to understand to start their DevOps transformation journey. Students learn to define DevOps as the union of people, process, and products for continuous value delivery. The content covers identifying transformation teams, establishing shared goals and timelines, understanding cycle time optimization, and implementing validated learning approaches. Key topics include Azure DevOps and GitHub platform introductions, source control fundamentals with Git, and practical strategies for organizational change management. The module emphasizes data-informed decision making, shortened cycle times, and continuous improvement practices that form the foundation of successful DevOps adoption.
• Plan Agile with GitHub Projects and Azure Boards: This module introduces you to GitHub Projects, GitHub Project Boards and Azure Boards. It explores ways to link Azure Boards and GitHub, configure GitHub Projects and Project views, and manage work with GitHub Projects.
• Design and implement branch strategies and workflows: This module explores Git branching types, concepts, and models for the continuous delivery process. It helps companies defining their branching strategy and organization.
• Collaborate with pull requests in Azure Repos: This module covers strategic code review practices, automated policy enforcement, and scalable team collaboration frameworks essential for modern DevOps implementations.
• Explore Git hooks: Learn how to use Git hooks to automatically check your code and improve your development process.
• Plan to foster inner source: Learn how to use Git to foster inner source development across your organization and implement fork workflows.
• Manage and configure repositories: Learn how to work with large code repositories, clean up repository data, and manage releases using GitHub.
• Identify technical debt: Learn how to find and manage technical debt in your code, use code quality tools, and plan effective code reviews.

2. Implement CI with Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions

• Explore Azure Pipelines: Learn what Azure Pipelines is, how it helps automate your development workflow, and key concepts you need to get started with building and deploying applications.
• Manage Azure Pipeline agents and pools: This module explores the differences between Microsoft-hosted and self-hosted agents, details job types, and configures agent pools. Understand typical situations to use agent pools and how to manage their security.
• Describe pipelines and concurrency: This module describes parallel jobs and how to estimate their usage. Also, it presents Azure Pipelines for open-source projects, explores Visual Designer and YAML pipelines.
• Design and implement a pipeline strategy: Learn how to design and implement effective pipeline strategies using Azure Pipelines. This module covers agent demands, multi-configuration builds, GitHub integration, testing strategies, code coverage, and source control options.
• Integrate with Azure Pipelines: Learn Azure Pipelines integration by exploring advanced pipeline anatomy, structure, templates, YAML resources, and multi-repository workflows. Build effective CI/CD solutions using modern pipeline practices.
• Introduction to GitHub Actions: Learn GitHub Actions fundamentals including workflows, events, jobs, and runners. Discover how to automate your development processes and read console output from actions.
• Learn continuous integration with GitHub Actions: Learn continuous integration with GitHub Actions by implementing workflows, managing environment variables and artifacts, creating secure secrets, and following industry best practices for robust CI/CD pipelines.
• Design a container build strategy: Learn to plan container build strategies, work with Docker containers, and deploy containerized applications using Azure services.

3. Design and implement a release strategy

• Create a Release Pipeline: Learn Azure Pipelines capabilities, build and release tasks, and deployment workflows.
• Explore release strategy recommendations: Learn critical release strategy recommendations for automated deployments. Understand release pipeline components, artifact sources, approval workflows, and release gate configurations.
• Configure and Provision Environments: Learn target environment provisioning, service connection configuration, and test infrastructure setup. Configure functional test automation and implement availability testing strategies.
• Manage and Modularize Tasks and Templates: This module explores task group creation, variable group management, and custom build and release task development for scalable pipeline architectures.
• Automate inspection of health: This module explores automated health event monitoring, notification configuration across Azure DevOps and GitHub platforms, service hook implementation for pipeline oversight, and quality measurement frameworks for robust release management processes.

4. Implement a secure continuous deployment using Azure Pipelines

• Introduction to deployment patterns: This module delivers comprehensive deployment pattern analysis through microservices architecture exploration, classical deployment methodology examination, and modern continuous delivery strategy implementation for optimized release cycle management.
• Implement blue-green deployment and feature toggles: This module delivers comprehensive blue-green deployment methodology implementation and feature toggle architecture design for controlled progressive delivery, zero-downtime releases, and dynamic feature management.
• Implement canary releases and dark launching: This module delivers comprehensive canary release implementation strategies, Azure Traffic Manager configuration for gradual traffic shifting, and dark launching methodologies for risk-mitigated progressive delivery.
• Implement A/B testing and progressive exposure deployment: This module delivers comprehensive A/B testing implementation strategies, progressive exposure deployment patterns, and ring-based CI/CD architectures for data-driven feature validation and phased rollout orchestration.
• Integrate with identity management systems: This module delivers comprehensive identity integration strategies encompassing GitHub single sign-on (SSO) authentication, Microsoft Entra ID workload identities, service principal provisioning, and managed identity implementations for secure DevOps workflows.
• Manage application configuration data: This module delivers comprehensive configuration management strategies encompassing externalized configuration patterns, separation of concerns architectures, Azure App Configuration implementation, Key Vault secret management integration, and dynamic feature flag orchestration for secure, maintainable application settings.

5. Manage infrastructure as code using Azure and DSC

• Explore Infrastructure as Code and configuration management: This module examines Infrastructure as Code (IaC) foundational concepts encompassing environment deployment provisioning and configuration management methodologies. Content explores imperative versus declarative configuration approaches, idempotent configuration principles, and organizational implementation strategies enabling automated infrastructure operations with version control, consistency, and reproducibility.
• Create Azure Resources by using Azure Resource Manager templates: This module explores Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates) and their components, teaching you how to create declarative infrastructure as code. Learn to manage dependencies, modularize templates for reusability, and securely handle secrets with Azure Key Vault integration. Discover both JSON ARM templates and modern Bicep syntax for efficient Azure resource deployment.
• Create Azure Resources Using Azure CLI: This module teaches you how to use the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) to create and manage Azure resources efficiently. Learn to install Azure CLI across Windows, Linux, and macOS, execute commands interactively, create Bash automation scripts, and troubleshoot common issues. Discover best practices for authentication, resource group management, and storage account creation using this powerful cross-platform tool.
• Explore Azure Automation with DevOps: Learn how to implement Azure Automation with DevOps using runbooks, webhooks, and PowerShell workflows. Understand how to create automation accounts, manage shared resources, integrate with source control systems, and plan for hybrid cloud management across Azure and on-premises environments.
• Implement Desired State Configuration (DSC): This module describes Desired State Configuration (DSC) and its components for implementation with Azure Automation. Learn to manage configuration drift, create DSC configurations, implement DSC for Linux environments, and plan for hybrid management scenarios.
• Implement Bicep: This module explains Bicep and how it integrates with different tools such as Azure CLI, Visual Studio Code, Azure Pipelines, and GitHub workflows for infrastructure as code deployment. Learn to create, deploy, and manage Azure resources using Bicep templates.

6. Implement security and validate code bases for compliance

• Introduction to Secure DevOps: Learn to integrate security throughout your DevOps lifecycle by understanding DevSecOps principles, identifying common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, implementing continuous security validation in your pipelines, conducting effective threat modeling, and using automated security analysis tools like GitHub CodeQL. Build secure applications by embedding security practices into every stage of development and deployment.
• Implement open-source software: This module explores how modern software is built with open-source components, corporate concerns about security and licensing, common open-source licenses (MIT, Apache, GPL), license implications for commercial use, and strategies for managing open-source software in enterprise environments.
• Software Composition Analysis: This module explains Software Composition Analysis (SCA) fundamentals, inspecting and validating code bases for compliance, implementing GitHub Dependabot for automated vulnerability detection, integrating SCA tools like Mend (WhiteSource), Snyk, and OWASP Dependency-Check into Azure Pipelines, automating container image scanning, and interpreting security alerts from scanning tools.
• Security monitoring and governance: This module explores comprehensive security monitoring and governance for Azure DevOps environments. Learn to implement pipeline security, configure Microsoft Defender for Cloud for threat protection and compliance, manage Azure Policy for governance enforcement, secure resources with locks, use Microsoft Defender for Identity threat detection, and integrate GitHub Advanced Security with Microsoft Defender for unified security visibility across your development lifecycle.

7. Design and implement a dependency management strategy

• Explore package dependencies: This module explores dependency management concepts and helps you identify project dependencies. You'll learn how to decompose your system, identify dependencies, understand package componentization, and scan your codebase for dependencies. Gain practical knowledge of dependency management strategies using Azure Artifacts, NuGet, npm, and Maven to manage software components effectively.
• Understand package management: This module describes package management fundamentals including package feeds, package feed managers, common public package sources, self-hosted and SaaS-based solutions, and practical guidance for consuming, creating, and publishing packages using Azure Artifacts and other package management tools.
• Migrate, consolidate, and secure artifacts: This module details package migration strategies, artifact repository consolidation approaches, and comprehensive security configuration to secure access to package feeds and artifact repositories using Azure Artifacts roles, permissions, and authentication mechanisms.
• Implement a versioning strategy: This module explains versioning strategies for packaging, semantic versioning principles, package promotion workflows, and best practices for managing package versions throughout the software development lifecycle. Learn to use Azure Artifacts views to indicate package quality and implement automated versioning in CI/CD pipelines.
• Introduction to GitHub Packages: This module introduces you to GitHub Packages, a package hosting service fully integrated with GitHub. Learn how to publish packages from repositories, install packages in projects, manage package lifecycle through deletion and restoration, and control access using permissions and visibility settings. Understand authentication methods and best practices for secure package management.

8. Implement continuous feedback

• Implement Tools to Track Usage and Flow: This module introduces you to continuous feedback practices and monitoring tools essential for tracking application usage and flow. Learn how to implement Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights to gain deep insights into application performance, user behavior, and system health. Explore Kusto Query Language (KQL) for powerful data analysis and understand the inner loop development workflow for faster feedback cycles.
• Develop monitor and status dashboards: This comprehensive module teaches you to develop effective monitoring and status dashboards for modern DevOps environments. You'll learn to use Azure Dashboards for integrated visualizations, Azure Monitor Workbooks for interactive reporting, and Power BI for advanced analytics. Learn to configure GitHub monitoring, track critical pipeline health metrics (failure rates, duration, flaky tests), and optimize pipeline performance for cost, time, and reliability. Discover strategies for building custom monitoring applications and implementing concurrency optimization to maximize throughput while controlling costs.
• Share knowledge within teams: This module teaches you to establish effective knowledge sharing practices within development teams using Azure DevOps Wikis, GitHub documentation, and Microsoft Teams integration. Learn to create and manage project wikis, write documentation with Markdown and Mermaid diagrams, integrate DevOps tools with communication platforms, and implement strategies to preserve organizational knowledge as teams evolve. Discover how to avoid relearning lessons, reduce onboarding time, and improve team collaboration through structured documentation and real-time notifications.
• Design processes to automate application analytics: This module teaches you to design automated analytics processes for modern applications. Learn to implement Application Insights, integrate telemetry data, use augmented search for rapid problem identification, and select appropriate monitoring tools to ensure application health and optimal user experience in fast-paced DevOps environments.
• Manage alerts, blameless retrospectives and a just culture: This module teaches you to manage monitoring alerts effectively, conduct blameless retrospectives that focus on learning rather than blame, and build a just culture where engineers feel safe reporting mistakes. Learn to improve application performance by identifying real issues with Azure Application Insights smart detection, reducing meaningless alerts, and understanding server response-time degradation patterns.