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Microsoft has a new beta exam on Learn. AZ-401 is titled Designing and Implementing Microsoft Agentic DevOps Solutions, and it leads to a new credential, Microsoft Certified: Agentic DevOps Engineer Expert (beta).
Microsoft updated the exam page on October 15 and the study guide on October 13, so the details may still shift. Everything below comes from those pages.
Last Monday it was AB-400 for Power Platform developers. Now the same agentic push has reached DevOps.
What's on it
The weights:
Build and release pipelines, 35-40%
Processes and communications, 15-20%
Security and compliance, 15-20%
Instrumentation, 15-20%
Source control, 10-15%
Pipelines carry more than a third of the score, which is about what you'd expect from a DevOps exam. The bullets underneath are where it changes, and almost every section now has an AI tool or agent attached to it.
You write YAML pipelines with GitHub Copilot. You configure the Azure DevOps MCP server and the GitHub MCP server. You design and implement GitHub Agentic Workflows. In the instrumentation section you deploy the Azure SRE Agent and Azure Copilot Observability Agent, then investigate the issues the SRE Agent raises.
One bullet made me smile. Under source control, you perform a repository-to-repository migration from Azure DevOps to GitHub. I read that as a hint about which way Microsoft expects the traffic to flow.
Who it's for
Microsoft describes a developer or infrastructure admin with real YAML, KQL and Bicep experience. You should also have worked in both Azure DevOps and GitHub, using Microsoft and GitHub AI tools.
It's English only, the passing score is 700, and beta exams aren't scored right away because Microsoft is still gathering data on the questions. There are no learning paths yet and no practice assessment. You can try the exam sandbox, and the study guide is solid.
The pages don't say what happens to AZ-400, the current DevOps Engineer Expert exam. I wouldn't change plans if you're mid-prep for it.
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Also new this week
On October 16, AWS made Azure SDK to AWS SDK code conversion generally available in AWS Transform. It converts cloud-native .NET apps. Azure Functions becomes Lambda, Blob Storage becomes S3, Queue Storage becomes SQS, and Cosmos DB becomes DynamoDB (that one is still in preview).
It's live in 8 regions, and the announcement doesn't mention pricing. If you hold certs on both clouds, it's a decent way to see how much of one maps to the other.
What to do
Already working in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions? Read the AZ-401 study guide this week. It tells you what Microsoft thinks a DevOps engineer does now.
Studying for AZ-400? Keep going. Nothing I found says it's going away.
Everyone else? Skim the skills list and note which MCP and agent terms you can't explain yet. Those are the gaps.
Keep Learning and Building.
If you're studying for Azure or AWS right now, Learn Cloud Academy makes two apps for exactly that. Learn Azure and Learn AWS each have 2,000+ practice questions, and every question links to the official documentation behind it. Miss one and you can read the real answer on the spot. Both are on iOS and Android, and more than 100,000 people have used them.
If you'd rather study in a browser, the same material is on learncloudacademy.com and one price covers all 3 platforms. Get 50% off using Coupon Code BF50OFF for a limited time only.
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