AZ-400 Release Management 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Azure DevOps feature allows you to require manual approval before a deployment proceeds to a production environment?
- Pre-deployment gates
- Pre-deployment approvals (Correct answer)
- Release triggers
- Deployment slots
Correct answer: Pre-deployment approvals
Pre-deployment approvals in Azure Pipelines require designated approvers to manually authorize a deployment before it proceeds to the target stage.
Question 2: A team wants to automatically roll back a release if Application Insights detects error rates above 5% after deployment. Which release pipeline feature should they configure?
- Deployment conditions
- Post-deployment gates (Correct answer)
- Pre-deployment approvals
- Release triggers
Correct answer: Post-deployment gates
Post-deployment gates evaluate conditions after deployment (such as Application Insights metrics) and can trigger automatic rollback if thresholds are breached.
Question 3: What is the purpose of a deployment group in Azure Pipelines?
- A logical set of target machines for deployment jobs (Correct answer)
- A collection of release approvers
- A group of related pipeline stages
- A set of environment variables for a release
Correct answer: A logical set of target machines for deployment jobs
A deployment group is a logical set of physical or virtual target machines, each with an installed agent, used to run deployment jobs across multiple servers.
Question 4: Which deployment strategy deploys a new version to a small subset of servers first, monitors results, then gradually rolls out to all servers?
- Blue-green deployment
- Canary deployment
- Rolling deployment (Correct answer)
- Shadow deployment
Correct answer: Rolling deployment
Rolling deployment incrementally updates servers in batches, reducing risk by monitoring each batch before proceeding to the next.
Question 5: In Azure Pipelines, what does a release trigger set to 'Continuous deployment' do?
- Deploys to all stages simultaneously
- Creates a new release automatically whenever the linked artifact is updated (Correct answer)
- Requires manual creation of each release
- Triggers a release on a fixed schedule
Correct answer: Creates a new release automatically whenever the linked artifact is updated
A continuous deployment trigger automatically creates and starts a new release pipeline run whenever a new build artifact is published.
Question 6: A company needs to ensure their Azure release pipeline only deploys during business hours on weekdays. Which feature should they use?
- Branch filters
- Scheduled triggers
- Deployment conditions with time-based gates (Correct answer)
- Agent pool restrictions
Correct answer: Deployment conditions with time-based gates
Deployment conditions allow you to specify time-based restrictions (schedifying allowed deployment windows) to prevent releases outside approved hours.
Question 7: What is the key benefit of using release variables scoped to a specific stage in Azure Pipelines?
- They encrypt secrets automatically without a key vault
- They allow stage-specific values like environment URLs without duplicating pipelines (Correct answer)
- They prevent other stages from reading any pipeline variables
- They are automatically deleted after the stage completes
Correct answer: They allow stage-specific values like environment URLs without duplicating pipelines
Stage-scoped variables let you define environment-specific values (e.g., connection strings, URLs) that override pipeline-level variables only within that stage.
AZ-400 Release Management 2
Which Azure DevOps feature allows you to require manual approval before a deployment proceeds to a production environment?