Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

Your organization uses Azure DevOps Services with multiple projects and 50+ teams. Each team has its own Azure Boards area paths and iterations. Leadership requires cross-project portfolio reporting (epics/features) and consistent work item states without forcing all teams into a single process. You must minimize disruption and preserve team autonomy. What should you implement?

A highly regulated team uses Azure Repos Git. They require: (1) all changes to main must be peer-reviewed, (2) merges must be traceable to a work item, (3) build validation must run on the exact merge result, and (4) administrators must not be able to bypass these controls. Which approach best satisfies all requirements?

You manage a mono-repo in Azure Repos with 30 microservices. Each service has its own CI pipeline YAML. Builds are slow because most pipelines trigger on any change. You need to ensure only the impacted services build when changes occur, while still running a full integration build for shared library changes. Additionally, you must prevent developers from bypassing required pipeline checks. What should you do?

A multi-stage YAML pipeline deploys to Dev, Test, and Prod Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. A recent incident occurred because a hotfix deployed to Prod without the expected approvals when a rerun was triggered from a later stage. You need to guarantee that every deployment to each environment enforces approvals, checks, and secrets scoping, even on reruns and stage restarts. What is the best solution?

You use self-hosted Windows build agents for a pipeline that builds and signs .NET desktop installers. The pipeline intermittently fails with missing dependencies, and security has flagged that the agent machine retains build outputs and credentials across jobs. You need deterministic builds, improved isolation, and reduced secret exposure while keeping on-prem signing keys. What should you implement?

A pipeline deploys an Azure App Service using ZipDeploy. Occasionally, production deployments succeed but the app serves mixed versions for several minutes. You suspect multiple instances are not updated consistently and warm-up is not complete before traffic is routed. You need near-zero-downtime deployments and rapid rollback. What should you use?

You publish internal NuGet packages from Azure Artifacts. Multiple pipelines consume these packages. After enabling package retention policies, some pipelines started failing because they referenced floating versions (e.g., 1.*) and older packages were deleted. You must ensure reproducible builds, limit storage, and avoid breaking changes for consumers. What should you implement?

Your team must implement compliance controls for Azure DevOps pipelines: secrets must not be stored in variables, production deployments must use least-privileged identities, and all privileged actions must be auditable. You also need to prevent developers from adding new service connections without review. Which solution best meets these requirements?

You are migrating from classic release pipelines to multi-stage YAML. Security requires separation of duties: developers can author pipeline code, but only release managers can approve and execute production deployments. However, the pipeline must still be fully automated up to the production gate and maintain an audit trail. What should you implement?

You operate a distributed microservices platform on AKS and Azure Functions. You need end-to-end transaction tracing across services, correlate logs/metrics/traces, and quickly identify which deployment introduced a latency regression. The solution must support automated release annotations and enable querying by build/release identifiers. What should you implement?