Misc

Question 1

Whats load balancing services are available on Azure?

Answer 1

These resources include Azure Application Gateway, Azure Front Door, Azure Load Balancer, and Azure Traffic Manager.

Question 2

What’s the difference between cycle time and leadtime?

Answer 2

Question 3

What is Azure Active Directory Conditional Access

Answer 3

Conditional Access policies at their simplest are if-then statements; if a user wants to access a resource, then they must complete an action. For example: If a user wants to access an application or service like Microsoft 365, then they must perform multifactor authentication to gain access.

Administrators are faced with two primary goals:

Empower users to be productive wherever and whenever
Protect the organization’s assets
Use Conditional Access policies to apply the right access controls when needed to keep your organization secure.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/conditional-access/overview

User or group membership
IP Location information
Device
Application
Real-time and calculated risk detection
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Question 4

What are the common use cases of Deployment gates?

Answer 4

Some common use cases for deployment gates are:

Incident management: Ensure certain criteria are met before proceeding with deployment. For example, ensure deployment occurs only if no priority zero bugs exist.

Seek approvals: Notify external users such as legal departments, auditors, or IT managers about a deployment by integrating with other services such as Microsoft Teams or Slack and wait for their approvals.

Quality validation: Query pipeline metrics such as pass rate or code coverage and deploy only if they are within a predefined threshold.

Security scan: Perform security checks such as artifacts scanning, code signing, and policy checking. A deployment gate might initiate the scan and wait for it to complete, or just check for completion.

User experience relative to baseline: Using product telemetry, ensure the user experience hasn’t regressed from the baseline state. The user experience metrics before the deployment could be used as baseline.

Change management: Wait for change management procedures in a system such as ServiceNow to complete before proceeding with deployment.

Infrastructure health: Execute monitoring and validate the infrastructure against compliance rules after deployment, or wait for healthy resource utilization and a positive security report.

You can enable gates at the start of a stage (Pre-deployment conditions) or at the end of a stage (Post-deployment conditions) or for both. See Set up gates for more details.

Question 5

What is an environment?

Answer 5

Environment represents a collection of resources targeted for deployment. Gates support the automatic collection and evaluation of external health signals prior to completing a release stage. Dependencies specify a requirement that must be met to run the next job or stage. Service connections enable a connection to a remote service that is required to execute tasks in a job.

Question 6

What are the terms greenfield and brownfield about?

Answer 6

greenfield:
There was no existing codebase.
No existing team dynamics of politics. Possibly no current, rigid processes.

brownfield:
The baggage of existing codebases.
Existing teams.
A significant amount of technical debt.

Question 7

systems of record versus systems of engagement

Answer 7

record: banks, data based tech. Evolve slowly.
engagement: fast evolution, innovative.

Both good candidates for implementing DevOps

Question 8

What are the different user groups?

Answer 8

Canary users voluntarily test bleeding edge features as soon as they’re available.
Early adopters who voluntarily preview releases, considered more refined than the code that exposes canary users.
Users who consume the products after passing through canary and early adopters.

Question 9

What are the faster outcomes KPIs?

Answer 9

Deployment Frequency. Increasing the frequency of deployments is often a critical driver in DevOps Projects.
Deployment Speed. It is necessary to reduce the time that they take.
Deployment Size. How many features, stories, and bug fixes are being deployed each time?
Lead Time. How long does it take from the creation of a work item until it is completed?

Question 10

What are the efficiency KPIs?

Answer 10

Server to Admin Ratio. Are the projects reducing the number of administrators required for a given number of servers?
Staff Member to Customers Ratio. Is it possible for fewer staff members to serve a given number of customers?
Application Usage. How busy is the application?
Application Performance. Is the application performance improving or dropping? (Based upon application metrics)?

Question 11

What are the quality and security KPIs?

Answer 11

Deployment failure rates. How often do deployments (or applications) fail?
Application failure rates. How often do application failures occur, such as configuration failures, performance timeouts, and so on?
Mean time to recover. How quickly can you recover from a failure?
Bug report rates. You do not want customers finding bugs in your code. Is the amount they are seeing increasing or lowering?
Test pass rates. How well is your automated testing working?
Defect escape rate. What percentage of defects are being found in production?
Availability. What percentage of time is the application truly available for customers?
Service level agreement achievement. Are you meeting your service level agreements (SLAs)?
Mean time to detection. If there is a failure, how long does it take for it to be detected?

Question 12

What are the culture KPIs?

Answer 12

Employee morale. Are employees happy with the transformation and where the organization is heading? Are they still willing to respond to further changes? This metric can be challenging to measure but is often done by periodic, anonymous employee surveys.
Retention rates. Is the organization losing staff?

Question 13

Which command can you perform with the Azure Pipelines with Microsoft Teams integration?

Answer 13

You can run the @azure pipelines subscribe [pipeline url] command to subscribe to an Azure Pipeline. Create and Unlink only works with the Azure Boards integration.

Question 14

What’s the definition of DevOps?

Answer 14

DevOps as the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.

Question 15

Continuous delivery Vs continuous deployment

Answer 15

Continuous delivery does not necessary deploy code but it passes through all deployment steps up until the final deploy step. This is good to know the problems you’ll face if deploying even if you aren’t actually going to deploy.

Question 16

What are the nice features of a release-management tool?

Answer 16

• Supports our version control system.
• Can deploy to multiple environments so that we can test and validate our work.
• Makes it easy to define our deployment tasks.
• Is easy to extend.

Question 17

What are ARM templates?

Answer 17

JSON Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates) allow you to specify your project’s infrastructure in a declarative and reusable way. They define the infrastructure and configuration for your deployment in a declarative style.
ARM templates are idempotent.
It checks the template before starting the deployment to make sure the deployment will succeed.
Modular. Can nest.

Question 18

What are the components of an ARM template?

Answer 18

Required: schema & contentVersion
Optional: apiProfile, parameters, variables, functions, resources & output

Question 19

What is the maximum number of parameters you can have in an arm template?

Answer 19

In the parameters section of the template, you specify which values you can input when you deploy the resources. You’re limited to 256 parameters in a template.

The allowed types of parameters are:

string
secureString
integers
boolean
object
secureObject
array

Question 20

Tell me about parallel jobs.

Answer 20

Parallel jobs are purchased at the organization level, and they’re shared by all projects in an organization. Both Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs and self-hosted parallel jobs are available.

For self-hosted parallel jobs, the self-hosted agent must be installed on the machine.

Question 21

What are the defaults for parallel jobs in terms of limits?

Answer 21

For Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs, you can get up to 10 free Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs that can run for up to 360 minutes (6 hours) each time for public projects.

For private projects you can run one parallel job for a maximum run time of one hour.

A job is not consumed while waiting for a manual intervention. Another job in the queue will begin.

Question 22

Can I assign a parallel job to a specific project or agent pool?

Answer 22

Currently, there isn’t a way to partition or dedicate parallel job capacity to a specific project or agent pool

Question 23

What is meant by ‘shift-left’?

Answer 23

Test earlier in the process (to Q1 or Q2 rather than in Q3 or Q4).

The goal for shifting left is to move quality upstream by performing tests early in the pipeline. It represents the phrase “fail fast, fail often” combining test and process improvements reduces the time it takes for tests to be run and the impact of failures later on.

The idea is to ensure that most of the testing is complete before merging a change into the main branch.

Question 24

What are the principles of good testing?

Answer 24

Question 25

What is microsoft Sentinal?

Answer 25

Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native solution that provides:

Security information and event management (SIEM)
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)

Question 26

What is SIEM?

Answer 26

Security information and event management

Question 27

What is SOAR?

Answer 27

Security orchestration, automation and response

Question 28

What’s a Kusto query?

Answer 28

A Kusto query is a read-only request to process data and return results. The request is stated in plain text that’s easy to read, author, and automate. A Kusto query has one or more query statements and returns data in a tabular or graph format.

Tabular query statements contain zero or more operators. Each operator starts with a tabular input and returns a tabular output. Operators are sequenced by a pipe (|). Data flows, or is piped, from one operator to the next. The data is filtered or manipulated at each step and fed into the following step.

Think of it like a funnel, where you start out with an entire data table. Each time the data passes through another operator, it’s filtered, rearranged, or summarized. Because the piping of information from one operator to another is sequential, the query’s operator order is important. At the end of the funnel, you’re left with a refined output.

These operators are KQL-specific, although they often have parallels to SQL or other languages.

StormEvents 
| where StartTime between (datetime(2007-11-01) .. datetime(2007-12-01))
| where State == "FLORIDA"  
| count 

Question 29

What are the kusto query operators?

Answer 29

• take (limit results returned)
• project (include columns you want to see in the output: column names are separated by commas and can bge renamed in this same command using <current_name>=<new_name> format)</new_name></current_name>
• project-away (exclude columns)
• where (normal greater size difference such as < and <= (ago(365d) format can be used to compare datetimes), ==, contains (case insensitive, any substring), has (like contains but only matches whole words so faster and more efficient but not as thorough), where time between (datetime(value)..datetime(value))
• sort e.g. sort by <field_one> <asc> <additional> e.g.`sort by State asc, DamageProperty`</additional></asc></field_one>
• top e.g. top 10 (like take but more performant)

StormEvents
| where StartTime between (datetime(4-1-2007)..datetime(4-30-2007))
| where State == "VIRGINIA"
| project Damage=DamageProperty+DamageCrops, EventType
| top 5 by Damage

Question 30

Where are task groups supported?

Answer 30

• Classic build
• Classic release

Not in yaml, for yaml use templates.