Azure Solutions Architect & DevOps Course: AZ-305 + AZ-400

Both AZ-305 and AZ-400 sit behind an associate level prerequisite. Rather than assume you hold it, we teach it. If you already have AZ-104 this module is your revision weekend.

• Tenants, management groups, subscriptions and resource organisation
• Entra ID identities, groups, RBAC and conditional access basics
• Azure Policy, tags, blueprints and cost governance from day one
• Storage accounts, redundancy options and access control
• Core networking and monitoring concepts the expert exams assume you know
• Hands on: build a governed landing subscription from scratch

Networking is where architecture interviews and exam case studies concentrate, because it is the layer that is expensive to get wrong.

• VNet design, subnetting, peering and hub and spoke topology
• Network security groups, application security groups and private endpoints
• Load Balancer, Application Gateway with WAF, and Front Door at the edge
• ExpressRoute and VPN for hybrid connectivity
• DNS design, both private and public
• Hands on: a hub and spoke network with a protected, scaled web tier

The exam gives you a workload and asks which platform fits. This module builds the judgement to answer that in one pass.

• Virtual machines, scale sets, App Service, Container Apps and Functions compared
• Choosing a compute platform against cost, control and operational burden
• Azure SQL service tiers, high availability and backup design
• Cosmos DB models, consistency levels and partitioning
• Blob tiers, lifecycle policies and data residency requirements
• Hands on: design the full data and compute layer for an enterprise application

Continuity questions are answered with numbers. We teach the maths behind availability targets so you can defend a design rather than guess at it.

• Identity architecture: managed identity, service principals, workload identity federation
• Zero trust principles applied to an Azure estate
• Availability zones, availability sets and how SLA composition actually works
• Backup, Azure Site Recovery and designing to a stated RTO and RPO
• Encryption, Key Vault and secrets architecture
• Hands on: a disaster recovery plan with a failover drill you actually run

The architect exam is case study heavy. This weekend is spent working full case studies under time rather than reviewing slides.

• The Well Architected Framework applied to exam scenarios
• Full length case studies worked end to end as a group
• The four AZ-305 design areas reviewed in blueprint proportion
• A full length domain scored mock plus score report review
• Exam booking, question strategy and time management

The DevOps track opens with the tooling the exam is named after, and with the source control strategy questions candidates routinely underestimate.

• Boards, backlogs and the flow of work through an engineering team
• Repos, branching strategies, branch policies and pull request workflows
• YAML pipelines: stages, jobs, templates, variable groups and environments
• Approvals, gates and deployment protection rules
• Self hosted against Microsoft hosted agents, and when each is right
• Hands on: a multi stage commit to deploy pipeline with approvals

Every serious Azure estate is defined in code. The exam expects Bicep fluency, the market expects Terraform, so you learn both.

• ARM templates and why Bicep replaced hand written JSON
• Bicep modules, parameters, scopes and what if deployments
• Terraform on Azure: providers, state management, modules and workspaces
• Multi environment patterns across development, staging and production
• Drift detection, policy as code and preventing configuration decay
• Hands on: deploy an entire environment from code in a single run

Containers are the delivery target for most new Azure workloads, and AKS operations is the skill that separates senior DevOps candidates.

• Docker images, multi stage builds and image hygiene
• Azure Container Registry, geo replication and image scanning
• AKS core objects: deployments, services, ingress, config and secrets
• Node pools, cluster upgrades, autoscaling and workload identity
• Helm for packaging and repeatable releases
• Hands on: containerise a service and run it on AKS behind ingress

Shipping without downtime is a design decision, not a hope. This module covers the release patterns the exam and real teams both expect.

• GitHub Actions workflows and OIDC federation to Azure without secrets
• Choosing between Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions in a real organisation
• Blue green, canary and ring based deployment patterns
• Feature flags and decoupling release from deployment
• Database change management alongside application releases
• Hands on: progressive delivery to AKS with automatic rollback on failure

Security in the pipeline is a full AZ-400 objective and the first thing an enterprise review will test.

• Key Vault integration, secret rotation and eliminating stored credentials
• Workload identity federation and keyless deployment
• Dependency scanning, secret scanning and software bill of materials
• Container image scanning and admission control
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud and compliance reporting
• Hands on: a pipeline that fails the build on a real vulnerability

The feedback loop objective is the one most candidates revise last and lose marks on. It is also what makes on call survivable.

• Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and writing KQL that answers real questions
• Application Insights, distributed tracing and dependency mapping
• Service level objectives, error budgets and actionable alerting
• Incident response, blameless postmortems and continuous feedback
• The full AZ-400 outline reviewed in blueprint proportion
• A full length domain scored mock plus score report review

The layer nobody else teaches. Cloud engineering is being reshaped by AI assistance faster than any other discipline, and using it well is now a hiring signal.

• Generating and reviewing Bicep and Terraform with Claude, and catching what it gets wrong
• Pipeline copilots: release notes, change summaries and runbook drafts
• AI assisted incident response wired to Azure Monitor alerts
• Automated cost and security review passes across an estate
• Claude Code for repository wide refactors and migrations
• Capstone: ship a monitored, IaC managed service end to end and present the architecture